


Fingertips

by spaceOdementia



Category: Frozen (Disney Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Chapter 2 is post-Frozen 2, Dark, Dark Elsa (Disney), Drama, Emotional Turmoil, F/M, From Sex to Love, Happy Ending, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, Love/Hate, Mind Games, Mostly Canon Compliant, Non-consensual to consenual, Prisoner Hans, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Content, Stupidly long oneshot, Temporarily Unrequited Love, Who am I, accidental two-shot, actually i can, mature themes, sinful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:20:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 31,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21654391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceOdementia/pseuds/spaceOdementia
Summary: Make me scream. Do you think you can?
Relationships: Elsa/Hans (Disney)
Comments: 97
Kudos: 321





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, you lovely readers. Let me preface this by being completely honest. This is filth. This is the trashiest thing I've ever done. I don't know who I am right now.
> 
> I started this before Frozen 2, and I wanted to finish it before it came out in theaters. That obviously didn't happen, and I've now finally seen it! Regardless, there are no spoilers from it.
> 
> Anyway, if you came to stop by and check out my writing, thank you so much. Here's my thousands of warnings that this ain't sweet, and it is complete, utter garbage, and insanely long, but I do hope some of you enjoy it. I had posted this to ffnet first, and it probably was in poor taste, as the rating on this is technically illegal on that site...Eh. Oh well. Any reviews or thoughts are greatly appreciated and always loved immensely. Happy reading!

How did they get here?

Elsa wonders this as she looks down at Hans Westergaard's green eyes. They look up at her with contempt, condescension sprinkled with arrogance, a snarled smirk filled with narcissism and deliberate amusement, as if he knows something she doesn't. The line of his teeth are shadowed with the bright rustiness of blood, his bottom lip bruised with a developing redness from a beating earlier this evening from a guard. He is on his knees, his arms shackled behind him as he hangs forward, chest heaving with pants from his pain. Sweat trickles into the hair of his brow, hitting an old cut hidden underneath the darkened auburn.

He is a devil kneeling there, before her, unwilling and beaten down, forced into this position beneath her as if pushed into an artificial worship, wrists cutting against the rough metal of the shackles, the links clinking together with a quiet, rebellious growl.

"Queen," he rasps, his eyes glaring and beady, heated with a glazed vibrancy. How does she look at him? Are her eyes filled with disdain? Or uncertainty? Does her skin crawl? Does it populate with goosebumps, a firecracker of electricity from the madness he creates in her skull?

She hates him. She knows it. He infuriates her, and she wants to keep him here forever in this personal prison. His own little Hell, a steady decline in his own filth, watching his life slowly fade, his arrogance gradually blunted until the root is erased and no longer there.

Doesn't she want that?

She's never been a vindictive woman. His smirk reminds her of that—he knows it, too. He thinks, will she truly suck his life out of him like a vampire, like a witch and monster? If she can do it to one man, can't she do this to many?

He's told her this before. With nothing to lose, a man's tongue twists into a thousand words, a thousand cuts, and he's done his best to hurt her with them.

He slowly stands, failing at hiding his wince. He turns his head to the side and spits out a wad of saliva and blood at her feet.

"To what do I owe the privilege of seeing you, Your Highness?" he says, his voice guttural, only a puff of breath expelling from his mouth. He is quickly losing his voice, and she sees the banded shadow of bruising along his neck.

He is pale, his skin clammy. His attire is rumpled and torn, old sweat stains marring the once cleanly cut and expensive, finely woven linen fabric.

What does she feel as she looks at him? Fear? Anxiety? Apathy? The slow, coalescing burn of a ponderous hatred, like a fissure in the deepest veins of her abdomen?

She answers several words to his questions. _I do not like you,_ she has said. _You will never attempt murder again. You will die here. You were traded by your family for silence, and I gladly accepted._

 _You will rot here,_ she said, when he goaded her, punched her buttons with his tongue, sharply and quickly. _You will no longer be a man. You will no longer be the man who you are or were. You will no longer know yourself._

 _Oh, show me then, Queen Elsa. Warp me, rip me apart. Do you think you have what it takes?_ He smiled at her, a sharp, shrewd smile. She knew then he didn't believe she would. He didn't think she had the guts, the steel in her heart.

As he stands before her now, she must look up to him. He still doesn't believe, as he smirks, as his skin permanently colors into reds and blacks of broken blood vessels, as he loses his voice from cracked vocal cords.

 _You're a kitten, not a dog,_ he's told her. _You drink cream on a throne. You don't eat the flesh of men._

 _Yours will be the first,_ she hissed back.

She dreads coming here. She should not continue, because it is dangerous. The cell is charged with too much energy. Fire builds in her spine and ice crackles at her fingertips, and everything is out of balance, here. There is too much. Too much musk and sweat from him, too much uncertainty and bravado from her.

She can say a lot of things, she thinks. She can say a lot of things and not mean any of them.

"I privilege you with questions," she says. She keeps her back stiff, her shoulders straight. She maintains her bravado, always—the confidence of a queen, even when insecure and faced down by a bloody and bruised specter, a smirking shadow creeping underneath a layer of her skin. She must keep her gloves on when she makes these visits, and he noticed the first day and every day since. He knows. That's the crux of the matter. He sees through her like a window, the sill opened, her frozen breezes obvious and magnified.

"Questions," he croaks, eyes shining like marbles.

Elsa clears her throat, keeping his stare. She will not be weak. She will say words that mean nothing, because she can, because this is a game just as it's always been. Goading and jabbing and twisting, finding which words plunge deep into bone, grinding and filing to the marrow.

"I have different questions, today, Hans Westergaard," she says. She looks down at her hands, spreading out her fingers in her gloves. They are white satin—excessively luxurious and bright in the dim, grimy cage of the dungeon. "I know you think me weak, keeping these gloves on."

She pauses, then she peels them away, plucking each finger up and off. She folds them together, placing them into her pocket.

"Gloveless or not," he rasps, "you'll always be weak."

She smiles at him, eyeing his hair and his clothes, all the way down to his bare feet. "Then I will ask you, now." She raises a finger up to his face, and he jerks away from her. "Oh, are you frightened?"

He grimaces, his throat bobbing with a swallow. "Of course not."

She looks over him. "If I touched your face, what would you do? Would you welcome my freeze? You always enjoy the beating of my guards. Surely you'd enjoy mine."

"You try," he says, chest heaving with effort. "To be—intimidating. You are not."

"If I encased your body in ice," she says, stepping a foot back. An ice sheet materializes from the hem of her dress, hitting his feet and rising up his legs like a flood. "Would you fight against it?"

He grunts. She can tell he is trying not to react, the smirk plastered on his face. Goading, goading.

"Fight? No," he heaves.

She allows the ice to raise up to his neck. He is immobile against the new prison.

"If I let my ice suffocate you, would you plead for mercy?" she says.

The ice cracks with her pressure, pushing into his sternum. He wheezes, head bobbing, but he smiles at her.

"Never," he huffs, his lungs desperate where his words are not.

"If I didn't use my ice at all," she says, the ice vanishing. Hans gasps for breath immediately. "Would it disappoint you?"

"Interesting," he says. "What—you're doing, Elsa."

She glares up to him, trying and failing to mimic his smirk. "If I used my hands to do my dirty work, would you pull away from them?"

Hans stands up straighter. He looks at her darkly.

"What—dirty work?"

She brings her hand up, placing her palm along the bruise banded like a ring around his neck. She squeezes. He automatically jerks away from her.

"Whatever I need to do," she says.

He dissects her with his stare, digging around to find her bluff.

"You? No," he huffs. "You couldn't."

"But I would," she says, stepping forward, closer, her blood like thunder, booming in her skull. "No one is here except you and I. All the guards are off duty. I can do what I want."

"Want?" He pushes up closer to her. He attempts to intimidate, but Elsa tries to remember he is stuck. He has no use of his body. He can only puff up his chest, peacock his strength and audacity. He can only act, just as she can, and—strangely, it's at that moment, when he endeavors to be bigger than he is that Elsa sees how small and how little the influence he has against her. It is her mind that holds her back, as it always has, and it is the feeble movement of his body that breaks her free. The rush of this makes her dizzy, lightheaded with the sense of superiority, of control.

She reaches a hand up to a bruise on his face, pressing her thumb hard into it. He shows no indication he feels it.

"If I press my fingers into every cut you have, would you scream?" she asks.

He presses his head forward, harder. His eyes are barricaded in metal as he watches her. He's angry. It heats the atmosphere, thick and purulent like an infection. "Try," he breathes.

She brings up her other hand, pressing two of her fingers into the redness around his lip. His left eye twitches. She moves to his chest, the bedraggled shirt allowing an open triangle, a shallow cut hinting at the edge. His jaw clenches with her pressure. She digs her nail in deeper, and his breath hits her face. She reaches up to his neck once more, starting gradually. Her hand is too small to do as much damage as the guards before her, but it is enough. He can easily disengage if he wants, but he is as stubborn as a mule. With a grimace on his face, he wheezes, "I'll never scream for you."

"You can't scream if I choke you."

His lips turn up in a smirk, his neck tightening involuntarily with a feeble attempt at protection. She doesn't allow herself to think as she increases her grip, as she feels his reedy pulse in the side of his neck, as his eyes narrow and his chest heaves and jerks. If she thinks about it, she'll let go, and he'll grin at her with his slimy, self-assured grin. He'll lord over her. He'll win.

His body finally relents. He buckles and pulls away from her. He goes to kneel, his body heaving to fill his lungs. The air flowing into his windpipe is loud and gritty.

"Do you…enjoy this, Elsa?" he heaves. He spits again, his shackles shaking with the force of his breaths. "Maso…chistic. Sick, little queen."

"I do not enjoy this," Elsa denies, watching him huff and puff. He's still smiling. He acts unbothered even as he struggles. It riles her. Ice sparks between her fingertips, and his eyes hook on it. "I merely want you to feel how powerless you are."

"Powerless?" he says. "No. Not when…I make you…so angry."

He's right. She is angry. She can't hide her ice—it frosts her arms up to her elbows. She maintains the façade across her face, sculpted calm and cool, eyes as passive as she can make them.

"If your only power is making me angry, Hans, then what a sorry life you lead."

His shoulders shake in laughter. "Oh, Elsa," he breathes. "Every time you visit me, you forfeit. You lose every time you walk past the threshold of my cell." He cuts his eyes up to her. "Didn't you realize?"

Her heart pounds a blistering tattoo underneath her sternum. Her neck is white hot. A swirl of fractured ice spreads from her feet, spikes forming between the lines of her fist.

She steps forward in her wrath, grappling his neck once more. The spikes of ice slice through his flesh, bright red clashing with cold, clear fractals. He gurgles, a surprised breath taken away from him. She glares down into his eyes.

"Now I know," she says, her tone seething. "But I must come down here. I must _break_ you," she whispers. Her fingers tighten, and his wrists strain against his shackles.

"Ah," she says, as they stare at one another. "There's the fear. You're frightened, aren't you? But what do you have to be frightened of, Hans? I thought I was a weakling."

The blood begins to trickle, the droplets becoming a stream.

"I don't have the guts."

He's already pale, but he's becoming ashen. His eyes are becoming small, narrowed, suspicious, and finally—afraid. She feels the fear in his blood, wrapping around her frosted wrist, congealing there with the cold. Congealed fear in his eyes, congealed fear in the parting line of his lips.

It is euphoric—disgustingly and indulgently euphoric—knowing she is winning, transfiguring his arrogant smile into an open-mouthed frown.

She shoves him out of her grip, the lines of red coming from shallow cuts. They will not leave lasting damage, and he'll live to see another day with a few more scars and lingering bruises. His head lolls to the side. She flicks her wrists clean and the ice melts, hitting the stone floor with a pink mixture of water and blood.

They eye each other momentarily. It is easy for Elsa to maintain a withering stare, still on a high from her anger and euphoria. Hans stares back at her, face inscrutable, fear hidden under a blanket of shadow, a stone wall of silence.

Elsa swirls away from him, pushing out of the cell door, and slamming it shut. She turns the corner of the dungeon hallway, and she stops. She presses her back into the rough ridges of the wall, using it for support. Her knees weaken, and she looks down at her hands that are shaking violently. A rogue stain of Hans' blood survives on one of her fingertips. She wants to cry, but she doesn't. She wants to be repulsed with what she's done, but she can't be, because…

While Hans unwittingly showed his fear, her fear is different.

His pulse under her fingers. His blood on her hands. Ripping his leering grin off and mangling it into a frown. Clawing into his wounds, fresh and old.

She is afraid, because he's right. She _enjoys_ it.

* * *

She's a monster when she crosses into his cell.

She dreams of pushing her nails into his flesh, feeling it give way, pressing craters along his chest, bruises forming in their wake. He awakens the deepest, darkest trenches in her heart, black desires blotting out her common sense, obscuring her empathy and compassion.

She stands above him, and he upholds his arrogant smirking when she arrives. It's always present at the beginning. His eyes slither to her fingers, waiting and anticipating what they will do.

"What torture do you have for me today, Queen?" he asks. "One of the guards cuffed my ear. Another sealed my eye shut. Will you puncture me with your nails? Will you pry my eye open and stab me with ice?"

"I will if it will make you scream," she says. He smirks and smirks, his one eye glimmering like a spotlight, taunting her.

She wields her ice like knives. He spins his words like barbs. She nicks him with tender cuts, just breaking the skin over the most sensitive areas. His palms. His cheek. The soft skin under his ear. She lures a sharp gasp from him with the last cut, a blaze of triumph flying through her from his reaction.

"Do it, then," he says. "I want to see you try."

It is altered when he goads this way, she thinks. It's changed because he carelessly hangs his body on the shackles, lips shining, black and blue. His left eye is a slit, puckered and red. He is delirious with his pain, and he laughs when she continues to cut him. He grins when she pushes her finger around his swollen eye.

"My dear queen, you'll have to try harder than that."

Scowling, she takes his head in both of her hands. She grips his hair with a merciless pull.

His one eye glances over her. In the moment, Elsa wonders what he feels as he stares at her. He's close enough to spit in her face. If she was in his position, she would do exactly that. She would be stewing in contempt. She would squirm against him, bite his fingers to the bone, growl and snarl, jerk out of his hands.

He does none of these things. He stares at her, and he waits. He's a pitiful sight. She admits it in the back of her mind. He's one big bruise. He's a sack of inflamed skin.

Ice trickles out of her palms into the sides of his face and into the threads of hair. The tips of it become frosted, as if he's walked for hours in a winter storm. The freeze surrounds his temples, encasing his skull and blinding his mind.

His shoddy grin begins to diminish. His right eye begins to close. One deep sigh leaves him. He slurs nonsensical words, valiantly saying, _This won't work. You're not trying hard enough._

Then, once his body sags, jaw slackened, exhaustion creeping over him, freezing and freezing, _Are you killing me? Is this what it feels like?_

At the words, Elsa jerks away from him. His head bobs, and his body continues to hang. He doesn't try to move. She peers at him, but his chest rises and falls in deep breaths. He's passed out.

Her hands shake again. She tightens them into fists, and she ignores the guilt climbing her throat like vomit. She ignores it because she hates him. Because she's better than him. Because he's disgusting and cruel, and he mocks her because she's weak, and she promises to never be weak. He will never phase her.

She eyes his unconscious body, awkwardly hanging, his hands turning dark red from the cuffs cutting into them. He is a pitiful sight, she thinks again.

She goes forward and leans him against the wall, his hands recovering their normal color.

His quiet words ring in her ears that evening, vulnerable and soft and unfiltered.

_Are you killing me?_

Is this what it feels like?

* * *

He is bothered when she enters the next time. His face is curved differently. Neither eye is swollen, yet he is still decorated with the constant bruises and cuts. He smirks at her, but his eyes follow her with suspicion, with a distant wariness.

"Are you afraid, now?" she asks him.

"If you have to ask, the answer will always be no," he says.

"I almost killed you," she says.

"And yet you didn't," he says. "You aren't a killer, Elsa."

 _I wish I could be._ The thought darts unheeded in her mind, and she flinches at the words.

"I can make an exception," she says.

He eyes her, and she's ready for his laugh or his smile or rebuttal of her character. The distant wariness is back, but he smirks. Always smirking, always hiding.

"What will you do, today?" he says. "Cut off a finger? Slice off my ear? Blind me?"

"Fantasizing?" she asks.

"Preparing," he answers.

It surprises her. She's never thought of him needing to prepare for her visits. Or for anything else.

He's sitting on the ground this time. She comes forward and kneels in front of him. She reaches out a hand, and she notices him slightly shift against the wall. His shoulders press back.

She rests her palm on his stomach. "Do the guards feed you, or do they eat your food in front of you?"

His eyes flicker from her hand to her face. "Would you believe a prisoner over your own guards?"

"I've always had my suspicions. How is your hunger, Hans?" A large, blue snowflake appears from under her hand, expanding along his shirt.

His stomach is a taut band. "A different tactic you're playing, Elsa?"

The snowflake blooms bigger. His face denotes no discomfort, but his body cannot hide it. Goosebumps raise along his forearms. A shiver runs down his spine.

"No tactic," she says. Her ice becomes a corset around his abdomen. "No strategy."

Her nails dig into him. Her ice curls around him like an unrelenting hug. He tips his head back and watches her.

"Sure," he says. "No strategy."

Elsa builds her ice. She's learned from previous experience with Anna that her ice can penetrate through skin without tearing it, like water soaking a blanket.

She pushes her hand harder into him, urging the ice deeper. Hans' mouth parts a little, his breath squeezed forcefully out of him.

"What kind of hunger?" he says after a moment. He coughs, his shirt's wrinkles becoming frozen. "You're not talking about food."

"Living," she says softly, taking her hand away from him. The ice lingers. His jaw clenches. His eyebrows bunch. He's miserable.

When he says nothing, she continues. "You're scared of dying. I've seen it, and why? You're not getting out of here."

Hans' bends his knees, shifts around. His shoulders jut forward. He's scrambling uncomfortably, just slight, squirming motions, and he coughs again.

"What did you do? Freeze my stomach?" he huffs.

Elsa swallows her sympathy. It is mixed with the power of control, the disgusting indulgence, and she isn't sure what dominates inside of her. A strange blend of pleasure and guilt.

"Yes," she says.

"My hunger," he says, twisting around. He makes a frustrated grunt. "I don't know. Nobody wants to die."

She watches him. "Not even you? After what you've done?"

"No. Especially not after what I've done."

Elsa frowns deeply. The ice digs deeper, and Hans coughs and coughs. His face pinches. His knees curl up to his chest.

"Why?"

Hans looks up at her. He's angry. It permeates off him like steam.

"I want to watch you fail, Elsa," he says. "You want to break me, and I want to break _you."_ He pushes his head against the brick, pinching his eyes closed. "I will break you, if it's the last thing I do. It's all I have left."

"How will you possibly break me, Hans, tied up as you are?"

He shakes his shackles, growling. The pain is increasing, stomach shriveling in a violent quake. It is a vicious thing she's placed inside of him. It is a lump of crystal ice, a rock in his stomach, his smooth muscle inactive in frozen stasis.

"I will," he hisses. "I will."

His smirk is gone. His arrogance washed. Sweat beads along his brow. Under the haze of unreachable, unrelenting pain, Hans is dressed down to his skeleton. She's passed over his invulnerable shield of skin to his soft, unprotected insides. That's all it took. Less punches to his jaw, more clawing inside his bright red meat. Slipping under his skin in the most literal form.

This is only temporary. As soon as she lets go, he'll recover his grin. He'll bounce back quickly. But for this moment—for this moment, she sees the helpless man who has no future, who is disowned with no family, not a penny to his name. Isolated and alone, utterly and completely, as he should be. Shouldn't he be?

_It's all I have left._

She is a monster inside this cell. He is creating a monster in her, and she wonders if this is what he means. He's not breaking her—he's creating something. She can stop it if she wants—she knows she can—can't she?

Every time she passes through the cell door, she leaves part of herself behind. She loses a little, but watching him writhe under her control...she wins a little, too. It outweighs the loss, because he's falling apart. He's peeling open. He slides down to his side, breathing heavily.

"How long...will you watch me?" he asks, his eyes glazed.

"Why?" she asks. "Can you not handle a little bit of my ice, Hans?"

His jaw clenches. She's certain he'd glare at her if he wasn't so preoccupied.

"Of course...I can."

"I'll stop when you ask me."

He growls at that. He'll never ask her. He'd never let her win that way. He'll never give in. There's something admirable in that. Admirable and idiotic.

A minute passes, and Elsa almost relents. She has to walk away from him and glance out the cell window. When he coughs next, it is wet and strangled. Blood and spittle lie beside him, and Elsa lets go of him immediately.

His entire body unfurls. He goes to push himself up off the ground, but his body shakes and he remains on the ground. He is void of strength. He sweats rivulets as his body accommodates the internal changes.

But he smiles, and the monster in her grows and grows.

* * *

There's a thing about passion. It twists easily with a tongue, a thought, an idea. An emotion so pliable, jumping between hate, anger, lust, greed, envy. It dips a toe into every sin. It taps its finger on shoulders, turning eyes to look behind them, to pause, to wonder. It's a buildup—a scream caught in the throat, a kick in the stomach, nails cutting into skin.

It is an unfaithful mistress, overflowing Elsa's body like a bounty, leaving her wanting in its wake.

Tonight, they are a meter apart. The cuts on his face are a permanent fixture. His pain is exhilarating. Her heart speeds up when he forgets not to wince, when he slips up and shifts his body, trying to find another position that is not so sore. When he's vulnerable, she thrives. She doesn't feel this way with anything else. It perturbs her. It is unsettling—a dark pleasure she's addicted to. She knows it's unhealthy. She questions everything about it, and she is always uncertain. She doesn't know where this will take them—her torture, his smirking, her bravado, his indomitable demeanor.

They stare at one another. His eyes are dark, the color of a shadowed forest. The whites are bloodshot. He smirks at her, waiting.

"You can maim me. You could find a way to obliterate me, but you still haven't made me scream."

"I want your body intact," she says. "I only want your mind shattered in pieces."

His eyes rake over her. She should be repulsed. She should sneer. Instead, she feels naked, as if he can see beyond her layers and layers of clothing. Her heart scuttles behind her ribcage.

She makes him bleed, makes him grimace, and makes him feel pain, but it is not enough, anymore. Like the greediness of passion, of addiction, she needs something else. She needs to raise the stakes. As barren and forlorn as he is, she thinks, what else is there? What would he be if unshackled? If able to attempt something other than empty words? How can she make him lose his mind when physical pain is not enough?

"If I freed your wrists, what would be the first thing you would do?" she asks.

A glint crosses over his eyes.

"Do it,"he says. "If you're so curious, let me show you."

He'll plunge his fists into her chest. He'll rake his blunted nails into her skin like hooks. But he can't, because her ice would kill him first.

She allows one hand to land on his pant leg, upon his upper thigh. He stares her down and she stares back.

"Pain doesn't deter you," she says, and she is nervous of what she's about to do. It's a darkened blanket, a shadow out of her periphery grasping her with its fingers. "What about pleasure?"

"What about it?" He growls.

Her hand inches up further, and his back claps against the wall behind him.

"You don't know what you're playing at, Elsa," he says. His voice is gruff. This bothers him, and it is so obvious. She nearly smiles.

"I think I might know, but why don't I make sure?"

She presses her hand closer to the seam of his pants. They are thin, a barely there protection against the pressure of her palm, and his jaw clenches. She can almost hear his teeth grind.

"You're naive and innocent," he sneers.

"Am I?" She edges closer to him, and the lines of his face are tight. It's euphoric seeing this allowance of emotion. It splits across his face like a stain, and it drowns out her nerves. "Then why don't you tell me to stop, Hans?"

His throat bobs in a swallow. She has him undeniably pinned, beneath her hand and with her words. He will never say no. He will never ask her to quit. He'll bear it, as defiant as he is. He may even smile. The hate in him must be growing, because she can feel hers growing too—can't she?

Blooming in her chest. Caressing her bones. A hot, burning flare. She adds the slightest bit of friction, and Hans turns his head, glaring at the opposite wall. She's shocked to feel his arousal along the knuckles of her fingers. She almost jerks her hand away from him, but this was her intention wasn't it? So she forces it to stay, watching the cords of his neck tighten with fascination.

"Tell me to stop and I will," she whispers, one, two, three fingers testing and running along the most sensitive part of him. This is how to do it, she thinks. She's curled right under his armor to his soft underbelly. He doesn't look at her.

"Is that what you want?" he asks. "For me to stop you?"

She eyes the profile of his face, all blotchy with pale skin and grey bruises. She leans forward. "No," she says. She grips him in her palm and he is trying not to react, his body twitching involuntarily, his eyes trying to focus. "No, I want you to feel this."

He finally huffs after a minute, rolling his head back to look at her. His eyes dart down to her hand for a moment before he looks up to her and smiles.

"If you think this is going to make me bend, think again," he says. "I'll need more than this."

"Oh?" she breathes. His eyes underlie his bravado. They shine like they're alive. "What do you need?"

"More," he says again. "You think I'd lose control without your hand actually on my skin?" he scoffs. Y"ou underestimate me, Elsa. I'm disappointed."

She's never done this before, but he can't win, of course. He might even know. He might be calling her bluff. She moves her hand to the waistband of his pants. "I never underestimate you, Hans. Not after all this."

She dips her hand into his pants, and she finds the smooth skin—almost unbearable, delicate, silky—and she tries not to gasp. She's close enough to feel his stomach clench, and his smile falters a bit. He stares at her, never looking away. She stares back as she feels him, explores and experiments. She tries to find the weakest point, the right pressure to make him begin to crumble, to see his eyes fall away from her.

They don't fall away from each other. Something hits her throat as she does this—watching him so closely as she gently memorizes the most intimate, physical part of his being. Her heart booms like a racehorse. Uncontrolled ice slips out of her fingertips, and he buckles under her. A rush of breath flies out of him.

"Did you forget about my powers?" she asks.

"Of course not," he says smirking. "Do it again."

She does. He leans back into the wall. Her fingers find the end of his length, and his smirk bends beautifully.

"This is someone's twisted fantasy, I'm sure," he says, his voice a level thicker. "Being a prisoner, getting a mediocre handjob from a queen."

She tries not to let the word ring in her mind. Mediocre. She squeezes harder, and he jerks.

"How's that?" she asks. "Better?"

"Your hands are too cold. It's a bit of a turn off," he says in response.

"Then why are you sweating?" she asks. A line of sweat is beginning to bead along his forehead. "Maybe I'm not cold enough."

His bodily reactions steady her. His words are his only defense, after all. His words are all he has.

She keeps her pace rhythmic and constant. He's smirking and says, "Too bad you're so frigid. It's no wonder you're forced to fuck a prisoner. No one else will have you, will they?"

His words involuntarily make her pace increase, her pressure rise.

"It seems like your body enjoys this," she says roughly. "Why can't you control it? If you hate me so much, surely you'd be able to keep it in your pants."

He smiles at this, but his brows pinch. He scoffs and it sounds like a sigh. "Do you even know what that means, queen?"

His words are broken with longer pauses. He doesn't allow his words to sound forced or under duress, even as his neck begins to redden.

"I do now," she says. "You're unraveling."

"You wish I was," he says back. His body is pressing hard into the wall. One of his knees is beginning to bend, and Elsa realizes he's in a bracing position.

She keeps going, their eyes still locked. She leans closer, pressing her shoulder into his chest. At this angle, she can see his eyes are burning bright, the edge crazed, and he must be close.

"Hans," she breathes, icy breath hitting his feverish neck. "Hans. Let go."

"No," he breathes back. It finally sounds like he's breathless. His eyes become half lidded. "No, I...won't."

Her arm is burning. She squeezes harder and harder. She hits the top with her thumb once and twice, and the shade of Hans' face changes color—it surprises her so much that she does it a third time and a fourth, and then—

That's all it takes. She knows when it happens. His whole body trembles. His eyes finally snap shut. His lip curls. He tries his damnedest to the very end to give her the barest emotion, but his expression—she won't forget the split second of when he lost all control. When she pulled the soul out of his body. She has it memorized as soon as she sees it—vulnerable, face pinched, every movement trying to reject the impossible.

It floods her system like a drug. There is nothing like it.

Nothing even close.

* * *

Some days, she will bring him pain. Others, pleasure. Yet, like with every greedy passion, every awful addiction and insatiable hunger, she needs more.

More. More touching, more control. More bending and twisting of his pride. More sneers of displeasure, of him trying so hard to avoid the unavoidable sensations and the unwanted release.

He's becoming better at holding back. It takes a little longer each time, it takes a little more effort, a little more attention and unwavering stares, but always, inevitably, he crumbles. She wins.

 _Is this the part where you finish me?_ Hans wants to ask her, time after time. _The part where you force my body to react how my mind never will? To find the pulse of my emotion, to wheedle me down until I give you the expression you want? The agonized declaration for you to stop or continue because I'm falling apart?_

_To show you that you're winning? That you're emptying me until I'm dry with nothing left to give?_

As she touches him, fingers so intimate and kneading, he wants to ask, _What about you, your highness? Do you get off on watching me succumb to your fantasies? Does it exasperate you when I don't make a noise? When I don't react how you want me to?_

_Do you like how my body trembles under your fingers? The rush of control that fills you? Feeling me spill all over you?_

_How long will you do this until it's not enough? The edge of pleasure and pain doesn't fill you as it once did. You want more, just like_ I _want more. You want me to scream just like I want you to cry out in frustration, in revulsion, in anger. I want your face to twist with discontent, never fulfilling what you want._

"What's next, Elsa?" he asks her when she finishes with him. He lies against the wall, his wrists perpetually pulling at the shackles. "What else do you want to do to me?"

She looks over him, wiping her hand delicately with her handkerchief. She smiles at him, but she feels the tightness in her abdomen, in her jaw, the needy pull of greed. Of more.

"I want to see what you'll do to me," she says. She comes around him, her hand hesitating around one of his shackles before she pushes a pick of ice into the lock. His left wrist comes free, and the release of weight is jarring. His fingers tingle with life. He can't hold back a sigh.

"What I'll do to you?" he asks, smirking. _"_ Nothing good, I assure you."

"I'd expect nothing less." She continues to sit close to him, giving him ample room to touch her if he'd like to. When he does nothing but watch her and flex his fingers, she grips his hand and brings it to her neck.

"I've choked you," she says. "Don't you want me to stop breathing?" She squeezes his hand tight against her windpipe, her delicate neck. Her pulse is wild, vibrating into his palm like thunder. He watches her and she watches him back. He relaxes his hold, moving his thumb to hit her jawline. Then higher to graze her bottom lip.

She remains still for him, and it's perplexing. He moves his hand down to her shoulder, along her rib cage, to her hip. He pushes his thumb deep into its curve, waiting for her lips to part, for her to make any kind of reaction. She swallows, and it's enough for him. He gives her a tawdry grin.

"Has a man ever touched you, Elsa?" he asks her.

She smiles back at him. The tension of the game thrums between the inches of their bodies. "You don't think anyone has, do you? What would you feel if I said you were the first one?"

"I'd say I don't think you're lying, even though you wish you were," he says, gripping her tighter. "You wish you had more experience. You wish you wouldn't blush every time you feel my arousal."

Redness swarms her neck, and she glares at him. "I'm embarrassed for you. You're smaller than I imagined."

"Because you would know what constitutes as small," he snipes back. His hand lowers to the top of her thigh. She has three layers of undergarments underneath her dress, cushioning her with thick protection.

"Sore point, Hans?" she asks. "Did your brothers tease you?"

He runs his hand down to her calf, finding the lip of her dress.

"Have you thought about what I might feel like, Elsa? Not in your hands, but between your thighs?"

 _"_ You're repulsive," she says, eyes catching on his hand. It crawls up underneath her layers.

"You're a twisted little fiend," he says back, reaching up the inside of her thigh. She does her best to keep still, to not move away. Her body is tight, attempting calmness. It's as obvious as a storm on the horizon.

"Are you afraid, Elsa?" he says, one finger hitting the seam of her underwear _._ "You did this to yourself. Are you afraid you'll enjoy what I do?"

She grimaces at him, but she contradicts her expression by moving onto his lap, bringing his hand higher up to the juncture of her thighs. She pushes herself into his hand, and it's a surprise. Exhilarating and electric and terribly bold.

"Do you need me to show you what to do?" she taunts him. He feels a cold band along his wrist underneath her dress, and he doesn't have to see it to know there's a necklace of ice, delicate and threatening—a juxtaposition, a contradiction—along the joints of his hand.

She is evoking dominance. She is trying to feign power and control, but he can do what he wants to her. He can make his fingers as mean as he's able, even with the ice tied around him like a string. She won't tell him to stop. He wonders if she'll cry.

"Is it your turn to scream for me?" he asks her.

She grins, and it is dark on her face. It contrasts with her innocent eyes, making it all the more devious and artful. The imbalance cuts into him more than he expected, and he unceremoniously pushes his fingers beneath her underwear.

She doesn't expect it so soon. Her hands grip his shoulders. She holds back a cry. He knows she does, because he can feel it shudder through her chest.

"A queen like you, debasing herself with a prisoner. How will you go on after this?" he heckles her.

She tries valiantly not to respond to his ministrations, and they stare at one another as he hits the soft switches on the outside, then delving deeper inside of her. She is hot and slick. Her frosty breath hits his neck. Ice trails along his shoulders and down his chest. It creeps along the walls like spider's webbing. He's winning. She can't contain herself. She doesn't moan or pule, but her eyes tell him the story. He's breaking her down into a melted puddle of water.

"No one will believe you. I'll be the only one who knows we've been this close," she says. Her hands trail down to his groin, and her eyebrows pinch together.

"You're..." she trails. He hardens against her.

"I'm a man," Elsa, he says, curling his lip. It is his excuse as much as it is his defense. He can't control his body like he can control everything else. Her body is too full against him. She could be anyone and he'd respond exactly the same. It doesn't matter if he wants to break her. It doesn't matter that he wants to make her cry, to question her actions, to regret this all.

He bends his finger. Her lips press together, turning white. Her ice begins to wrap around his wrist, constricting him. She tries to protect herself, but he is incessant. He keeps his pace. Her body begins to tremble.

She reaches into his pants and grabs him, and he knew this was coming. He knew, and it still doesn't help. He's already halfway to orgasm, with the heat of her body, with how tender her flesh is, with how desperately she is gripping him with no sound at all. They watch each other. They watch each other unfold. Hans knows her face better than anyone else, now, knees squeezing his hips, her body shaking in his lap. He knows what she feels like when she hugs his fingers, as he milks her mercilessly, as the ice burns his wrist and her hands squeeze until he unravels with her.

They breathe hard, but that's the only sound they make. Their bodies scream but their mouths remain quiet, lips twisting and locking and not saying a word.

* * *

When Elsa leaves him, she fixes her skirt, slicks her hair back into her braid. Nothing is amiss except for the glow around her cheeks, a healthy flush with gleaming eyes. A forced orgasm is an orgasm all the same, and it runs through her bloodstream like a hit of heroin, the high she's been searching for, the one thing she didn't realize she needed. They control each other—she used him for her own pleasure, and he made her feel the way he wanted her to. Who wins in this instance? She'll argue she does—she allowed his hand freedom, forced him to pleasure her as roughly as he wanted. She surrendered a level of control only to finish superior in the long run. His body responded well enough. Her heat and intensity inspired his own arousal, again, twice in one evening.

Hans will say he controlled the intensity of her climax. He gave her a level of sensation she's never had. He can lord it over her. He doesn't have to give her what she wants. She needs him for this newfound greediness, this burgeoning need. He sees it in her eyes, as much as she'll deny it. Now that the box is open, now that she knows what could be, there's no going back. It can only build. It can only evolve.

It is her monster. The ripple of uncontrolled power. It is the fiend.

* * *

"What do you want from me, now?" Hans asks her the next time. "Will you release my other hand?"

She stands before him, arms crossed over her chest. Her eyes cross over him like a line of fire. They are bullets, penetrating deep. She's getting better, he thinks.

In a moment, the shackles behind him snap loudly. He jumps a little, but his wrists come around, completely free. The metal has broken with her ice, the shards sparkling like glass under the moonlight that filters in through the bars. He remains sitting, staring up at her and waiting for her next move. It's never this easy.

"What will you do now that you're free?" she asks. "This is what you wanted, isn't it?" She stalks forward, standing in front of him.

He goes to stand slowly, watching her movements, looking around the bottom of her dress for any threats of ice.

"You could easily slit my throat, and everyone would conveniently turn their heads," he says. He takes a step forward to meet her. "If I make one wrong move, am I a dead man?" He smiles. "Probably not, considering it's you. You're still not a killer."

She calls up ice along her fingertips, sharpening them like claws. She raises a finger under his chin. "If you try to kill me, then I'll try to kill you."

This time, he believes her. He smirks, bringing his hands to her hips. He digs his own fingers into her. "You want to control me. What do you want from me?"

Your life, she wants to say. Your soul. You on the ground in a tangle of your own madness. Intangible things that are impossible.

Instead, she eyes his mouth and brings her hands up. She runs her fingers along the seam of his lips. Her nails hit his teeth.

"Your mouth has been your weapon, wielding your words," she says. "Use your mouth on me as you would use your hands."

A thin, blue glow of ice surrounds both of his wrists and his neck, the threat of her power lingering and prevailing.

"Make me scream," she whispers. "Do you think you can?"

It is a challenge, a dare, a taunt. Her eyes are filled with dusky heat. A lustful predator is enveloping her, and Hans can use this. He can make her believe she has him wrapped around her finger, like a puppet on a string.

He pushes her backward until the wall stops her. He kneels to the ground, and he rips the skirt of her dress with fierce, precise movements. She shifts a little, but he grabs her legs to keep her in place. He doesn't say anything. Instead, he grabs at her underwear and tugs it down, pushing the tulle of her dress out of his way with impatience. He gives no preamble. His mouth is on her in seconds.

Her body jerks, but he presses against her legs to keep them open. She wants to squeeze them shut until his tongue encourages her to relax against him. When he grazes his teeth against her, he hears her sharp, sudden gasp, and it spurs him on. He wants her to keep gasping, he wants her to choke on her breaths, he wants her to roll her head back against the wall and beg him for more and more and _more._ He wants her to say his name, just a puff of air from her lips, because that will be it. That will be everything.

He moves her legs onto his shoulders and he leverages her up, changing the angle. She presses into his mouth, rhythmic and unrelenting, the pulse hot and burning along the lines of his tongue.

She gives way a minute later, her inner thighs shaking, her legs wobbly and weak. He thinks about letting her slide to the floor on her own, landing with a thud on the ground, but she untangles herself from him first. She pushes off and uses the wall to hold her up. She stares down at him, eyes glancing over the shine hanging on to his lips and his chin.

"You didn't last very long, Elsa," he cajoles, smirking. "I thought you had more control than that."

"Your teeth are sharper than I gave you credit for, Hans," she says back. She fixes her skirt while her eyes settle lower, and she begins to smile. "You're not so unaffected."

 _"_ Like I said, _"_ he shrugs. "I'm a man."

"Then you can finish off yourself," she says, waving her hand. Icy cuffs hold his wrists in front of him, and he sits back, the shock of the ice sudden and abrupt.

She turns and leaves him. He watches her go, his arousal painful and desperate, bursting at the seams. He thinks he might have lost this time, after all.

* * *

From that time on, Elsa keeps Hans unshackled. She lets him roam and prowl around the cell. He's a ragged wolf, starved and bedraggled, hackles raised as his eyes follow her movements.

He doesn't frighten her as much as he used to—ironic, that he seems more harmless now when freed than he did when cuffed to the wall, but it's easier. She can bring him to his knees if she feels at all threatened, if he wheedles her enough, if he angers her. All of his words seem directed toward making her react, and while she knows this might be his intention, her heart beats too brightly when she sees his frown and his pain, the unwitting expressions he makes. He never begs, he always smiles when the shocks pass, but he always gives her what she loves: the shadow of feeling, a flicker behind his mask.

His eyes dig into her like a pickaxe as he prowls. She wonders if he's trying to find what she is—the flicker, the shadow? He wants her to flinch, but she's ready for it. The game gets harder, but they are getting better at playing.

Who will crack first? She thinks. Who will be the first to crumble?

Sometimes, he stands close to her, hovering over her. They leer at each other, their breaths intermingling, tainting the other.

 _"_ What do you want from me this lonely night, queen?" he asks her. "My fingers? My mouth? Or will you finally take the leap and plunge your ice into my chest?"

"No," she says. There is one more thing left. Elsa knows it, and she knows he does, too. Her stomach steels. Her heart gallops. They stare into each other—and they are so good at staring. She reaches forward and presses her palm into the tender seam of his trousers. Veins of ice climb out along his hips. "You know what I want."

What _they_ want. She sees it in his eyes every time. He can't hide it. The lust is as prevalent as the greed and the gluttony and the wrath and pride. They swarm his skin like ants. His knuckles tense. His eyes dilate. Their breaths intermingle, because they are always too close.

She pushes him backwards until the backs of his calves hit his pitiful cot. It is merely a cushion that hugs one corner of his cell, but it is enough. It will do.

"Use your hands and your mouth," she says. "But I want this." She grinds her hand against him, and one of his knee buckles. He raises a brow at her, one hand forcefully gripping her hip, the other already moving her skirts out of the way. He leans forward to her ear.

"You'll scream."

It's a promise. It's bordered with triumph. His fingers are pulling at her underwear.

"I won't, but you will," she says. His fingers slip into her skin, dipping and hitting the tender warmth. She exhales, but that's all she allows. She shoves down his pants and grips him just as fiercely. A short grunt is pulled from him, and that's what they give each other. Quiet sounds, silent expressions hidden under deep sensation.

It is frightening how well his hands know her. He hits an insatiable spot, and she grits her teeth and shoves his hand away. Then she shoves him backwards onto the cot, and she quickly follows him, placing herself on his lap and straddling his thighs.

He looks different this way, on his back and pressed down into the mattress. The moonlight glints off his hair, and it looks red instead of auburn. "I'm surprised. I didn't think you'd go through with this," he tells her.

"I hope you've done this before. It won't be as fun as I was hoping if I have to guide you."

He's smirking. "This will be much more painful for you. My fingers can only stretch you so much."

"You're disgusting," she says, her lip curling in distaste.

"You're the one straddling me, Elsa. Take off your dress."

She's never taking off her dress. He will never see what she looks like. He may feel, but he'll never see.

In answer, she moves up on his lap.

"No," she says.

"What a time to be modest—"

She glides over him, and his words end abruptly. His lips are parted, his eyebrows pinch, and his eyelids flutter. She feels it like a shock to her system—the power, the rare slack-jawed expression, and the friction of his flesh against her.

He comes back to himself in a moment, and he crawls his hands up her thighs until he reaches her hips. He rolls her forward, back and forth and back and forth until he's positioned at her entrance. She has nothing to hold onto other than his shoulders—the wall is too far away, and if she used the mattress, their bodies would be too close. Elsa knows that's a silly thought considering everything else, but she doesn't care. The distance matters to her.

She tries to prepare herself. She knows it will be painful before it will be ecstasy. He will not be gentle. He will not take his time. He will try to make her lose her mind, but so will she. She locks her eyes on him, and he takes her challenge. As he brings her back over him, he begins to slide into her, filling her up. It is a deep, deep pressure, and she tries not to whimper. She tries not to shake. Her body accommodates him, but it is sharp, like a knife plunging again and again, and it feels like she's tearing. She bites the inner meat of her lip hard, trying not to cry out in agony. The hands on her hips are unrelenting. The rhythm is a force. She is quaking, and she is not in control of anything. He is guiding her with his grip and his hips and she is spinning out, unstable with her footing, bombarded with too many sensations that toe the precipice of white hot pain and blazing pleasure. It pulls and tugs, pushing forward even as she wants to slow down. A fire blooms, a terrible heat competing against her ice.

Hans flips them over without losing contact, and Elsa can't stop him. Her ice covers them in a thin blanket, and snow lines the walls in white powder, but there is too much. Too much. If she allows any more her ice to expand outside of her, she might start a never ending winter, again. She might turn the castle into an icicle. She might kill Hans, and while that should be fine, _it would be fine, it's what she wants,_ it's not.

It's all she can do, then, not to cry out, or scream, or moan, or expel her voice for some relief. She covers her mouth with her hands, and she lets him continue winding her up, the fire consuming her—somehow more powerful and ravaging than anything else they've done.

He grabs one of her legs for a handhold, and he tries to smirk down at her—she sees it and is consumed with an odd mix of rage and pleasure—but it evolves into a grimace. His face is pinched in concentration, a sheen of sweat lingering along his neck. She bites her hand as hard as she can to keep herself quiet because it's unbearable, she's imploding, she may even be dying from the intensity, and it's just one thrust out of many when she finally feels the snap of her body, when it gives and breaks. She wants to twist out of her skin.

She squeezes him, strangles him. The inside of her clasping around him just like her fingers around his neck. Her eyes slam shut but not before she sees him unravel, too. His eyes are manic, tinted in the color of the craze. He is far from unaffected, and that's enough for her, even if he wins tonight. Even if he wins, he's lost something, too.

Neither try to hide their heavy breathing. He looks down upon her, and she looks up at him. It's a sick kind of fascination, watching the other in the afterglow, with the rush of the high fresh and wet and bright in their system. Hans disengages himself from her after a moment, and they lie on opposite sides of the mattress, catching their breath. Her dress is in a muddled disarray, with her corset somehow loosened, her skirts torn up in some places. She fingers the cotton fabric and the dangling threads.

"Take your dress off, next time," he says. He runs a hand through his hair, readjusting his trousers. "I'll rip everyone you have, and your reputation will become suspicious."

"Are you worried for my reputation?" she asks facetiously. "That's odd enough, coming from you."

"As much as I like to ruin your clothing," he says. "You'll soon be out of dresses to wear."

"You make it sound like you think this will be a normal occurrence."

"It will be," he says. "After this, the normal won't be enough for you."

She turns her head, catching his eye and glaring at him. "You don't know what is and isn't enough for me."

He smirks at her. "As much as you hate me, Elsa, you like what I can make you feel."

It's a terrifying conclusion, she thinks, as she glares harder at him. "Be careful. Your ego is showing."

"It's always showing, Elsa, because you make it so easy. You could barely hold back your moans. I bet you wanted to cry out my name, didn't you?"

Elsa nearly snarls at him, forming ice cuffs around his wrists. She stands up, readjusts her dress, and strides out of the cell doors.

"Only in your dreams," she hisses at him.

His laughter follows her down the dungeon hallways, and she feels ill. She feels very ill. His conclusion is right. As much as she hates him, the sensations are merciless and alarming and disgusting and so, so…

Wonderful.

As soon as she gets back to her bed chambers, she wants it all over again. It is insatiable. The evil, controlling, power hungry, lust-crazed monster inside of her digs its claws deeper and deeper.

How will this end? She thinks, staring up at her ceiling. How will this end?

* * *

Elsa begins to wear her night gowns to visit Hans. The first time she does, she feels bare and uncomfortable. Going in to his cell already vulnerable is dangerous and a gamble, and she's nervous—which is ridiculous—but she's as prepared as she'll ever be. She knows what to expect physically, at least.

The glare he gives her is heated, and he seems incensed, angrier than normal. His green eyes are dark, almost black, as he looks her up and down. He stalks up to her in the middle of the room, and though he is not as big in stature as he used to be, he is still intimidating. An emaciated lion is still a lion.

One hand reaches up and takes a fold of the gown between his fingers.

"This is different," he states.

"Easier to manage," she says.

"Easier to replace," he counters. He smirks at her, and she sneers at him. His arrogance remains, no matter what she does or says. It inspires her to forget her _never_ thought. _He'll never see underneath my clothes._

Because that is just one more silly thing to protect her. No, if she's going to win, she will do whatever it takes.

She brings a hand up to the strap of the gown and pushes it off her shoulder. Then she pushes the other one down, gently letting her gown loosen in the front. She takes one step back from him and allows the gown to puddle at her feet. She is only wearing her underwear underneath. She did not put on a bra. As she stands on display for him, the room's temperature drops one degree by degree, and she tries to reign it all in because the nerves never disappeared. She's never been so bare in front of a man—in front of anyone—and he's engulfing her whole.

She lets out a shaky breath, clenches her hands into fists before relaxing them, realizing belatedly that she must look terrified, she must look like a scared little runt of a queen, and she can't let him see that.

She's ready for his insults. _You're a waif,_ he'll say. _Disproportionate,_ _asymmetrical, too skinny._ _If you bent too far backward, I'm sure your spine would break._

Instead, he comes forward, fingers lingering on her sides. One travels up to the side of her breast, and she tries to hold back a shudder. His head dips closer, and she jerks away from him. He seems amused.

"What do you think I'm going to do?" he says. Then he bites the side of her neck, and she can't help the gasp that comes out of her. He flicks his thumb across the sensitive flesh of her breast, and he squeezes her hip.

It's new, all of this touching. They don't touch one another like this. She lets her hands come up and land on his chest, mimicking him, her fingers finding the divot of his collarbones. He sighs against her neck, beginning to lick the areas he bites, sucking her skin like he's trying to eat her. Her hands rove to the back of his head, pushing him harder against her neck and her jaw.

The hand at her hip dives down into her underwear, and he coaxes a sound out of her, and she's not even mad about it. She breathes, "Make me moan. Make me beg. I don't think you can."

She allows it in the only way she knows how—making it a challenge, a dare. Will he? Can he?

"I'll make you say my name," he says back. It's how he accepts it. It's how she gives herself leeway to make all the noises she wants, because she can't contain them. As much willpower as she prides herself to have, the connection they build demands release in any way she can manage. She needs to moan and growl, she needs to pant while he loses his smirk underneath the manic haze of euphoria. If not, her ice will take over and he may make a murderer out of her after all.

He lifts her up and takes her to the mattress, lying her down while he barricades her with one arm. His other hand continues to pleasure her, and her back arches against him. She reaches down to the hem of his shirt with her hands, pulling up ineffectually.

"Take it off," she says, but he only smirks. She growls, sitting up and pulling it roughly over his head.

"Demanding tonight," he says.

In answer, she reaches down to his trousers and pushes them down with all her might. She grips him, and he sighs again. It is the most beautiful sound he can make, his smirk dwindling when she touches him this way. He almost seems vulnerable as she runs her fingers along his length.

He thumbs her, hitting the sensitive spots over and over, and it's so powerful, this time. So much faster, her body more accommodating. She forgets her bashful feelings and her nakedness, because suddenly the tightness between her thighs and his expressions are the only things that begin to matter.

She's not sure what she does to him, but she elicits a groan. It is brief and low, but it's enough to make her smile.

"Do that again," she says.

"No," he says, but she squeezes harder, and he complies.

"Damn it," he breathes, and he gives it back to her, hitting her deeper, rubbing in that _way_ , and her head falls back into the mattress.

"Oh,"she sighs. "Give me more."

"Is that begging, Elsa?"

She looks up at him, and she wonders what she must look like, because it wipes the smirk right off his face. His face slackens again, and his cheeks are flushed and unguarded.

"Yes," she says. "Yes, because this is _good."_

He's still a prince, and he still has princely manners beneath all of his sarcasm and snarls, she thinks, because he listens to her. He pulls her underwear off the rest of the way from their position around her thighs, and he situates himself immediately inside her legs. She wraps her legs around him, and his arms support himself on either side of her. They are close, she thinks again, but she doesn't quite care as he pushes into her. The sharp pressure fades quickly this time. It is no longer a knife, but a silken, beautiful pleasure. She must be making noises, but she loses her coherency. Her bare skin has stripped her down to the needy fiend within her. She is no longer only herself. She reaches one hand to grab his bicep and another presses back into the mattress, needing something to hold onto, needing a steady hold. The temperature of their bodies rise, but the room gets colder and colder.

"Elsa," he says, but it is not a breathy sigh or moan of pleasure. He's calling her to look at him, so she does. "Tell me what you want."

"Oh," she answers. "This is just fine."

"Just fine?"

"Mm," she says, relishing the glint in his eyes, as if he wants her to say something else. "Fine."

He pushes into her harder, and she gasps. "That's better."

"Good," he breathes, and his face is pinching in concentration again. He moves one hand behind her bottom and lifts her up a little, and she has an out of body experience. She finally hears herself, her sharp punches of breath, the sheen of sweat overlying her chest. His eyes find her, and their intensity darts into her stomach like an arrow. It shreds her intestines. Her stomach clenches violently. His eyes close for a moment.

She's close. He must feel it, because his other hand reaches down between them and gives her that extra pressure, that extra push with his fingers gliding over her flesh, and then she sees spots. She loses it. Light-headed and blinded, she clenches her teeth, her whole body seizes, and then she unwinds. Her legs shake as she releases him, and she belatedly realizes he's inches above her, barricaded, the weight of his hips pushing her down into the cot.

It is unsettling, but not all unwelcoming. The mere thought of that punches her back to reality.

"Get off," she says, trying to shove him away.

He huffs a laugh and rolls over. There is no blanket to cover herself with, but she immediately feels too exposed. She sits up and reaches for her underwear and slips them back on with some ungraceful maneuvers, before she goes to stand to get her gown. Her legs are shaky and clumsy.

Hans grabs her wrist before she walks away, and she plops back to the cot. She stares at him, bewildered.

Interestingly, he seems uncertain of what to say. He glances to her wrist that is in his hand, and he opens his mouth before letting her go.

"I…" he starts, then he recovers. "I made you beg."

"Keep it up, then," she says back. "It won't be so easy, next time."

He smirks at her, but it seems different. She thinks it's more the afterglow and the light from the moon. She stands up, shoves on her gown, and heads back to her bedchambers.

She tries not to think about the look he had given her, right before she left. The shadow overlying his smirk, how it softened his face. He did not look angry or hateful. It was the potent post-orgasmic high. It was the moonlight slashing across his face. That's what made him look so serene, so friendly. So approachable, like he isn't a conniving, slimy snake of a man.

Like he's human. Elsa scoffs. Elsa scoffs and wonders and imagines him having a heart, for one irresponsible moment.

* * *

The next two times, Hans is too dominant. He takes over her. He controls the pace, the force, the rhythm. While Elsa admits only to herself that she enjoys it, it is not the game. It's not the way she needs to play this, even though she is tired from the days of handling her professional title, of being the queen who listens to her country, who rules kindly but firmly, who keeps relations healthy between diplomats and leaders.

She can't let her guard down, especially during these midnight soirées, but it is almost a relief letting him pleasure her how she likes, even if she lets go of her role and lets him win. They both get what they want, regardless. They get better at the performance.

She doesn't hold back her noises, either. She lets them pour out of her, and she's noticed that it's encouraged Hans to as well. His panting is freer, his groans low from his belly when he makes them.

She notices more in these moments, taking in the curve of his face in the moonlight, noticing the lines of his chest and abdomen. His smirking is still there, but it is less prominent. Smirks dictate his face less, and a more serious scowl seems to temper his expressions when they play their staring game. He is less hidden, and it is a pleasure to see something other than arrogance and narcissism. Elsa hadn't thought anything else could have existed.

One night out of several, she walks into his cell. He doesn't seem to hear her at first. He is sitting on his cot, looking off to his right towards the barred window. His expression doesn't hold a scowl. It holds a frown. His eyes are listless and they almost look...bereft. Sad.

Hunger, her mind flashes the word behind her eyes. He's always had the hunger.

She sits beside him on the cot, and he startles. It is uncharacteristic to be so unsuspecting.

"Elsa," he says.

"What are you thinking about?"

He looks at her, then glances away to the window. A small smile lifts up the corners of his mouth. "Dying."

She blinks. "Dying?"

He shrugs. "How long have I been here? I thought about scratching tallies into the walls, but thought that was a bit melodramatic."

Elsa swallows. "Six months."

"Six months? Huh," he says. "It feels so much longer."

It's a game he's playing, she thinks. It must be, to make her feel sympathy and compassion. To feel guilty, to tug at her heartstrings.

It won't work. She steels herself.

"Don't you dare," she says.

He blinks at her. "What?"

"Play it this way," she says. "Try to make me feel sorry for you."

He begins to smirk. The life in his eyes begins to revive. "I'm not. It's all in your pretty head."

She narrows her eyes at him. She stands up, and her ice creeps from her feet. It begins to encompass him into a pressurized cocoon on the cot. His breathing becomes labored.

"You're getting better," he huffs. "More cutthroat, more suspicious."

More monstrous, her mind says, and she clenches her teeth. She waves her hand and the ice vanishes. He sucks in a few deep breaths of air, rubbing his chest.

She wonders if she can ever believe him, if they ever talked to each other, really conversed, rather than read each other's eyes and physical needs. If they could ever be as vulnerable with words as they are with their bodies, what would happen?

Would it change anything?

When he catches his breath, he looks at her. She stands away from him, her arms crossed over her chest.

"Sit by me," he says. "Like you were before."

She should leave. She squints at him, but she slowly walks forward, back to the cot.

They've never just...sat with each other. Elsa fidgets. She keeps half a foot between them, legs stretched out before her. Silence fills the space, until finally, Hans asks, "What did you do today?"

Elsa almost laughs. "Why? So you can say something cruel about it and I'll choke you until you're unconscious?"

Hans shrugs. "Sure, whatever you'd like."

She stares at him for a while before she tells him. The recounting of it all is exhausting—the meetings, renegotiating taxes, letter writing, opening the courtyard for the villagers to improve morale during the busy season.

Hans says nothing, whether this is to spite her previous statement or not she's not sure. He merely listens. Eventually his eyes close, and his head dips to the side. His temple bumps her shoulder, and he jerks awake, sitting up quickly.

"I—" he starts, trying to smirk it away. Elsa watches him, curious how he'll respond. He seems oddly embarrassed. She suspects he'll say something along the lines of how boring her life is, how much work she has to put forth for so little.

Instead, he hesitates. "I don't know why I'm tired," he says. "I don't do anything."

"At least I know I'm not the only one bored to tears over politics," she says.

Hans smiles at this. It's a real smile—Elsa can tell because it's abrupt and surprised. They stare at each other. His smile starts diminishing.

"I know you didn't come all this way to talk to me," he says. He lays a hand on her thigh. "Tell me what you want."

For the first time in a long while, Elsa swallows. She's almost conditioned to say _You know what I want_. Or to reach out to his pants, to push her palm against him. The lust inside of her still burns, but it's different tonight. She always wants what he's offering, but there is no edge to tonight. There is no goading or taunting. They are merely sitting together on his small, uncomfortable cot with no expectation.

It's different.

She places her hand on top of his and removes it from her thigh. She shakes her head.

"Not tonight, Hans, but next time."

He looks at her as if he's figuring out something, as if he has done something wrong. He is suspicious in his own way.

"Turned off by me asking you about yourself?" he asks.

"No," she answers. "It's just..."

Different. It's the only word that can describe it. It's stuck in her head like a broken record.

"We're both tired."

"When has that ever stopped us?"

He leans forward to kiss her neck, biting it gently. Her reaction is immediate. Her pores stand on end. Everything tightens up.

_"Hans..."_

But it's already too late. He reaches a hand to her breast, feeling her pert underneath the thin guise of her gown. One of her hands reaches the back of his neck while the other one follows the hand on her chest, kneading and pressing.

"You're..." she tries. His other hand reaches up to lower the strap on her shoulder. "You're..."

"I'm what?" he mutters, his breath hot against her. He pulls at her other strap, tugging the night gown down. It puddles on her abdomen, her chest on display. His mouth moves from her neck to her collarbone, her collarbone to her breast. She sucks in a mouthful of air on his contact—he's never done this before. It's always been so manic when she's here. She always nearly begins undressing as soon as she enters, with him giving her no preamble as he touches her.

This time it's...sensual. It's slow. He's using his mouth more, open and wet and hot, making a line down her torso.

She never finishes her thought. You're stubborn, she can say. You're unrelenting. You're insane.

You're talented. You're good at this. You're persuasive. But all these things will only feed his very obese ego, and he needs this least of all.

"You're forgetting," she finally says. "This is a game. We don't enjoy this."

He pauses for a moment, raising his eyebrow at her before continuing. He dips his tongue in her belly button. "Could have fooled me."

Her stomach clenches. Her head falls back, and he kisses her inner thigh.

"We do this for power," Elsa breathes. "We try to control each other."

"Do we?" he asks. He makes a line of kisses down her the joint of her knee. "It seems to be mutually beneficial now, doesn't it?"

Elsa almost growls at how cavalier he's being. She sits up and grabs the collar of his shirt, pulling him up and turning them over so that she straddles his hips, looking down at him. He grins crookedly up at her, arrogance oozing out of his pores.

She violently tugs up on his shirt, pulling it over his head. He lifts his arms to accommodate. Once freed with his torso bare, she mimics him. She presses her mouth to the middle line of his chest, she bites, she licks. She'll one-up him, she'll do it better. She can hear the vibration of his pleasure behind his sternum as he holds back his groaning, and she feels it like a blunt force to her stomach. She controls how much she gives him, and his reactions are more than enough.

Snow begins to cover the line of his cell, and Elsa doesn't notice the building snow drifts until a snowflake lands right beside the spot on his chest that she's kissing. It's a small little glimmer, melting into a tiny bud of water. One lands on his cheek, and it looks like a tear.

Hans blinks around, taking in the white around them. "It's…you're…" he trails.

Control, the word burns in Elsa's mind. She can't do both. She can't give pleasure and resist the tumult stewing inside of her. It hasn't been such a challenge before, after the first time, because she allowed herself to experience the sensations, letting Hans do with her what he wanted. But now, it's…

Different. Different. She hates it, but she likes it, too. The change of pace, the change of feeling.

She leans forward and bites his neck, running her hand down his abdomen, slipping her hand under the waistband of his pants. His words become stunted and barricaded behind his teeth, echoing down his throat. Elsa can almost feel them with her tongue on the sensitive skin of his neck.

"Say it," she whispers against him. "Tell me what you want from me, Hans."

Freedom. Life. She anticipates his answers, because she could see them in his eyes under the light of the moon, his soul beckoning for the outside of his barred window. She wants to hear the confession—his most vulnerable thoughts. Something irrevocably true.

"I want whatever you'll give me," he answers, looking into her eyes for a moment before closing them against the pressure of her hand. "Whatever you allow yourself to give me."

It is hard to determine how genuine he is, underneath her. She pushes his pants down and rocks against him, wanting to coax out the real words he wants to say, the real things he's desperately holding inside. She wonders for a minute more if that's it, if that's all he'll say. His breath comes out in plumes against the icy air, and yet his body is becoming lined with a thin sheen of sweat.

When he looks up at her with half-lidded eyes, he shocks her with a smile. "You could do this forever," he says. "I wouldn't mind."

"I would," she says. As wonderful as the sparks of building tension feel, it is not enough. She pauses to peel away her underwear. When she slides back onto him, his hands automatically go to her hips. He tries to set the pace, and Elsa grips his wrists, bringing them above his head.

"Not tonight," she tells him, creating a sheath of ice around his hands on the mattress. It's a makeshift zip tie, frozen on the cot and immobilized, and he scowls. She relishes it.

"Elsa—" he tries, but his words are stemmed, their faces too close. Her chest is pressed against his, her hands on his shoulders. His lips part into a shallow line, and his eyebrows loosen into a mystified curiosity. She keeps her rhythm against him as their breaths intermingle, and she witnesses every struggle he has against his ice cuffs, his frustration, and soon, his acceptance. He gives up his fight, eventually, and he watches her as if she's the only thing he's ever seen. Any other night it would be intimidating. His eyes are an all-encompassing green, as vivid as winter pine, and she'd blush so easily under his gaze if they hadn't already come so far in their physical endeavors.

He finds her rhythm eventually, matching her hips with his. More friction, more build up. It's slow—so slow—agonizing but steady, and his eyes never leave her, and when they begin hitting each other just like _that_ —Elsa feels his eyes digging like his fingers, touching her just as deeply, a very thorough, jolting barrage of sensation.

But she's not alone. It affects him, too. His mouth becomes a scowl, then his teeth grit, then they relax in a fit of wonder, because it's never been this long, or this smooth, or this slow. The intensity is more. More. It begins growing outside of Elsa's chest, sprouting through the pores of her skin. Her fingers start to claw deeper and deeper into his shoulders. His body begins to shake. There is a forceful tremor between both of them, unrecognizable in its glory, and Elsa's not sure how long it lasts or how long it takes her to catch her breath. Hours can have passed, hours or days. She's not sure when she closes her eyes until she opens them to see Hans looking at her like he's never looked at her before.

"That was…" he says hoarsely, never finishing.

Elsa finishes the thought without prompt.

"Different."

And then he does the most unforgivable thing she can fathom.

He kisses her.

* * *

It is a mere press of the lips, chaste and unassuming. It is everything she does not associate with Hans. Innocent. Gentle. Sweet.

She's frozen. The whole room is still with a shock of subzero air. The walls crack with fine, spiderweb lines of ice, breaking the thunderous silence. Elsa takes a while to come to, but she eventually jerks away, staring at him with wide eyes. He stares back at her, surprise evident in his expression.

"I…" he tries. Elsa takes in a deep breath, and his voice breaks through her shock. She begins to grimace, still feeling the pressure of his lips on her own. She rears back and brings her hand around. She smacks him across the cheek with an icy slap, and his head snaps to the side.

"How dare you," she seethes.

He squints his eye as he recovers, bringing up his own hand to cradle his very red, angry cheek.

"Dammit, Elsa," he growls.

"You have no right," she rages. "I didn't allow it. I _don't_ allow it."

"Oh, but you allow me to have sex whenever you want it? I didn't ask you to start this. I didn't ask you to touch me." He scoffs a laugh. "What's a kiss compared to what you just did tonight?"

Steam almost begins to whistle out of her ears. She's angry because of his audacity, but most importantly, she's angry because he's right, and he knows it, and while his cheek swells with broken blood vessels, he smirks crookedly up to her.

She hates him. She _hates_ him. This is all part of his plan. He's trying his best to worm his way under her skin like the little termite he is, eating her bones as if they're made of wood.

They are ensconced in white, in their own alternate world all to themselves. For this night and every night before, it has always been as though the outside world doesn't exist. Now, he's looking at her as if the world outside _does_ exist, because she'll think about this night long after she leaves. She will think of his green eyes as dark and potent as the pine trees that line the edge of her kingdom, the longing he allowed her to see before he realized she was present in his cell—and she'll play with this in her head, pick it apart until she convinces herself this is all his act, this is all disingenuous, he has no honest hair on his skull. He is a menace, and a fiend, a devil in handsome skin, and she can't allow manipulation to twist her heart or her mind.

And, yet, still, she will wonder.

_I want whatever you'll give me._

* * *

She gives him nothing for a long, long time. She doesn't visit him for weeks. She lets time settle its magic upon them, letting it dull the flying fire and ice that filled her stomach every evening before and after she would visit him. She does her best to let time dismantle the monster built inside of her, because it had grown so large inside of her that it seemed to be outside of her, too, like a vine on a trellis, abundant and parasitic, rooting itself and weaving its home in her heart.

Her will almost bends a thousand times. She almost visits him during the day. She's had many a sleepless night, imagining him on his cot staring up at the ceiling of his cell, out the barred window, fingers trailing against the rough, craggy bricks lining the walls.

She imagines him looking at his cell door, wondering about her, too.

It is a terrible withdrawal. The monster in her rages, ravenous and livid, asking questions that echo in her mind over and over, why don't you visit him? What's one visit? Two?

She needs an outlet for her magic, as it builds up inside of her veins when she has to be polite to the slimy diplomat who touches her shoulder time and again. When she has to smile at the lecherous, old king of Arcadia, who is newly widowed and in need of another queen. When no one listens to her opinion at the Annual Summit of the Ten Countries, because she is young, bestowed with powers she still cannot fully control, naïve, unmarried, orphaned, hardly knowing how to keep her own country running, much less several countries running—why should they take her opinion with anything less than a condescending smile?

She wants to stand on the table, take all of their throats by her ice, threaten them with how little control she does have—make them wish they would have given her the respect she deserves rather than brush her off like a child.

The ice blisters inside of her veins, rupturing them from the force she uses to hold it all back. Quelling her powers has never been so difficult, and she has no other option but to go outside to the forest and scream and create snow monsters and ice cliffs, throw icy knives into the trees and break their trunks like necks and wish she was someone else for a moment or a day or a year.

It's not enough. She falls to her knees and breathes heavily, gazing at the destruction she's left in her wake and wanting to holler and wail and cry out all of her frustration and hopelessness.

It's the last straw. That evening she goes back to visit Hans.

He has a fresh bruise on his right eye, a cut inside of his lip. His left ear is red rimmed with purple, having been cuffed multiple times. He is more beaten up than she has seen him in a long while, and she wonders if he is as crazy as she is—needing something to free him in the pain the guards are only too generous to give.

The moonlight cuts across his figure, and this time he is already standing by the window. He does not look as emaciated or scrawny. She wonders if he has also been like those prisoners she reads about—doing thousands of push ups and crunches in his endless downtime, burning up his energy in the only way he can. She's sure he would have a tattoo if that sort of thing was offered in Arendelle.

"They say it takes twenty-one days to break a habit," he says, looking over her. His arms are crossed over his chest. "It's been sixty. I thought you'd have forgotten all about me by now."

She stares at him, eyeing his thin lips, turned up in his signature smirk. She looks at his shaggy hair, a dark, rusty auburn. He is naturally pale, but the bruises give his face some color.

She takes a few steps closer to him, standing five feet away before stopping. "I did break it," she says, not sure if it's a true statement. "I was feeling nostalgic."

"Were you?" He asks, eyeing her up and down. As long as it's been, his perusal has the peculiar effect of feeling dressed down to her bones. "Or were you just tired of your dry spell, queen?"

She lifts one shoulder in a nonchalant dismissal. She reaches a finger out to touch his lip.

"Still having fun with the guards?"

"A bit. They aren't as much fun as you."

"No one is as fun as me."

"You're sounding a bit arrogant, Elsa. Taking a leaf out of my book?"

"You're not the only one who can act disgustingly conceited."

He grins at her. "Who says it's an act? You know it's my natural form."

Her finger falls to his chest, and her hand splays out against it. She can't feel his heart, and she wonders if it's hidden under his sternum, as black and blue as his face.

His grin fades away as they look at one another, and the atmosphere immediately darkens. The temperature drops. Snow lines the floor and the walls. Elsa feels all of her magic seeping out of her, like she's a balloon ready to burst, an overstuffed cushion. She breathes out in relief, the diminishing burden beautiful and blissful. Her eyes close as she relishes the sensation, her shoulders dropping from her ears and—how long have they been so tense?

Hans hands come up around her face, and her eyes open, her heart jumping at the sudden contact. She's not sure what she's expecting—a cruel and condescending smile that she's so used to from every other male she's encountered, perhaps, but she receives the opposite. He's frowning, his eyebrows knitted together as he cradles her face, and she should back away from him, from this gentle touch, as gentle as his one and only kiss was, but she finds she doesn't care so much. All she cares about is this unwinding pleasure twirling out of her muscles.

"Why are you here, Elsa?" he asks her. It sounds like, _What's wrong?_

"You know why I'm here," she says, and it falls out of her out of verbal memory, a knee-jerk reaction, even though she wants to say, _I'm here because I need you._

That's a scary thought, too. When has she ever needed anyone?

His forehead hits hers, and they breathe in one another. His breath is warm. Hers is freezing. His fingers braid into her hair. Her hands raise up to his shoulders and her fingers grip along the ridge of his shoulder blades.

How is it, she thinks, that she can release all of her powers on her own, squeeze them out of her system when the stress of holding back is too great, and it can only relieve her for an hour or a day?

Standing here before him, it is different, just as the last time, because her powers are blunted and calmed, the storm inside assuaged with the sensation of another.

"I won't kiss your lips this time _,"_ he says as his hand drops to the straps of her chemise. "I'll do whatever you ask."

It's a peculiar submission of power. She looks at him, her suspicion running high against the softness of his tone. She surveys him with sharp eyes, determining his angle for the evening, teasing out the double meaning of his words. His face doesn't give away insidious or beguiling intention. He's merely watching her as she lets him undress her. Her gown falls to the floor and he runs a hand down her side. She's never cold but goosebumps follow behind the trail he makes. He kisses the top of her shoulder, and the action is so intimate Elsa has to force herself from stepping away from him.

Instead, he takes a step back from her. He pulls his shirt over his head and drops it to the side on the floor. Then he pushes his pants down and steps out of them. Suddenly, they stand before one another, him completely naked and her with only her thin underwear keeping her hidden from full view.

It's too intense for her, standing before one another so openly. She has to forcibly keep her arms from hiding herself as his eyes scuttle over her. She looks over him and blushes. He seems very comfortable, the smirk that had been absent now creeping onto his face.

"What's wrong, Elsa? Shy?"

"Shut up," she huffs. "I'm not shy."

He steps toward her, placing his hands on her hips. His length presses against her stomach, and her mouth parts a little. "It's okay if you're shy, but there's no reason to be."

Elsa averts her eyes. "Why are you being so nice to me? You should be making fun of me instead, or telling me how unbecoming it is for me to be degrading myself this way."

He raises his brow at her. "I didn't think you came here because you enjoyed our verbal attacks. Besides, we've exhausted the topics pretty well, haven't we?"

She bites her lips together and stares at his collarbone. It doesn't matter. She presses harder against him, and he squeezes her closer.

"You can tell me what's bothering you if you want," he says.

She stares at him. "Why do you want to know?"

"I just..."

She waits for the lie she knows he's waiting to say, for his devious plan to become clear.

"No reason," he says. He begins leading her toward the cot.

"What's your motive, Hans?" she whispers. "What do you want me to tell you? Do you want me to talk about the outside world? Do you want me to tell you how it is moving on without you? What you're missing?"

He softly lies her down on the cot, pressing his weight into her. Elsa admits that the feeling is exquisite.

"Would you believe I was asking out of pure curiosity over your well-being?"

Elsa almost laughs _. "_ No _."_

"I didn't think you would," he says. He sits up, his weight lifted, and gazes down at her. He is a giant with his height, and the eyeful of her is searing. He curls his fingers under the band of her underwear and Elsa lifts her bottom up as he peels them off.

"You forget," he says, as he kneels down, his face right above her navel. "You're one of the three things I think about in this cell."

He trails open mouthed kisses down to the juncture of her thighs. She wants to tell him that she's never forgotten the things he thinks about because she's never known.

Her thoughts are scattered for a moment as his tongue rolls across her. She takes deep breaths and comes back to herself.

"What are the other two things?" she asks.

"I think you know," he says, and he's quiet for a long while as he uses his mouth for more important things than forming words. When she's wound up enough, he must hear her and feel it, because he takes his mouth away from her. Her ice digs into his back with frustration.

He smiles at her knowingly as she glares at him, breathing heavily.

"Freedom and death," he says. "And you."

"Freedom and death can mean anything," Elsa says. She pulls him up to settle back on top of her. She squeezes her legs around his hips. "What do you really think about?"

She's baiting him, but she's also intrigued.

"Why so interested, Elsa?" he asks. He positions himself at her entrance. "Want me to confess all about my grand plan to escape? Do you want me to tell you that I'm lying?"

He pushes into her and her head falls back. She moans with the motion, and his hand lands beside her shoulder. He shudders, his breath shaky.

"There's not much else to think about in here," he whispers.

"Confess," she rasps. "Your great escape."

"I can't," he huffs. "I don't have one."

"Liar," she says, her tone high and uneven. She is coming undone quicker than normal, and she tries to suppress it.

 _"_ I wish I was lying," he grunts. He picks up the pace. Her hand find his forearm beside her and claws into him. She wants to scream, teetering on the edge, finding that eclipse with her blood rushing and her ice bursting through her. It scrapes against her veins, and she can feel it, and she cries out from the pain and the irrepressible pleasure.

"Elsa," Hans pants. "Elsa, look at me."

Her eyes eventually loll open, and she sees stark white. Winter has taken up the entirety of the space. Icicles protrude dangerously from the ceiling, dipping four feet into the room. The window and the door is shielded by a wall of thick ice.

When she looks up to Hans, his hair is dusted with white, patchy shining spots of ice along his chest. He reminds her, in the moment, of a beautiful ice sculpture. His eyes are hazy and wild.

"Oh, Hans," she pants, no longer herself. She's another woman in another world, and he is not a man who wants her kingdom. "Oh, Hans."

There is a manic rush, suddenly and violently. Elsa is blinded by white, unable to differentiate her body from her snow and from the wild pleasure that they create between each other.

And then it ends in one more burst of passion and ice. Elsa has never been so affected before, so lost in the rush of her power, in the frenzy of release.

They stare at one another after it's over, Hans holding himself over her on his elbows, the ice melting against him with the mixture of his own sweat, his auburn hair darkened and damp along his temples and his sideburns.

"Are you alright?" he asks, glancing from her face to her arms. She can see his own arms shaking, his chest trembling with the effort to hold himself above her.

"Yes," she says, feeling her pulse in her forearms, her stomach, between her thighs. She's mildly surprised he's asking until she sees dark streaks traveling from her elbows to her wrists. She holds them before her, and they look like a bad injection. The streaks are a dark purple, bordered by red. It looks worse than it's ever been. She panics momentarily, and Hans gently removes himself from her. He takes a seat beside her, grasping an arm and doing his own investigation. He trails lightly up a streak with his fingers. Elsa takes a minute to calm herself, inhaling deep, soothing breaths.

"It's just my ice," she says, finally trusting her mind not to falter into abundant alarm. She eyes her other arm. "This has happened before, just not so...ugly."

Hans holds her arm like it might break. "Elsa..." he sighs. He brings her wrist up and runs a thumb along the crease, along a thick band of purple. She exhales a deep breath, watching how tender he is being with her and wondering about his heart again.

"It heals in a day or so." He begins caressing the skin up her forearm along the broken path. This makes her begin to panic again.

"That doesn't help," she says.

He glances up to her but continues. "How would you know?"

She shrugs. "I've never liked people touching me like that."

"I think you do like it, after all of this."

"I tolerate it because it doesn't mean anything."

"It could mean something, if we cared."

She laughs, bordering on manic. "You, caring? Please."

He gets to her elbow, hesitating before giving her one kiss into the notch. "No," he says. "If I could care, I'm sure it would be different. He starts to frown. I didn't know this could happen. You need to be better at handling your ice."

She glares at him. "It's only gotten this bad the past few weeks. It's fine."

"It's really not."

Elsa looks away from him, sighing. "This helps."

"What?"

"Doing what we're doing. It's my outlet. Nothing else seems to help. That's why I'm here, tonight."

"Then I guess I now have a reason to live, don't I?"

She looks to him to see if he's smirking, or smiling knowingly as if he's holding secrets behind his tongue. He isn't doing either. He's merely staring at her arm, running a thumb over the middle of it. A small frown decorates his lips.

"You don't have to do that, Hans."

He glances up to her. "What?"

"Act like a concerned party. It won't help your cause."

He sets her arm down carefully against the cot. "What cause is that?"

"Freedom. Death."

He waits for a moment. "You forgot to say _you_."

A twinge curls in her stomach. "I didn't forget," she says. "I don't apply."

"But couldn't you?"

This is a strange word game they're playing. Elsa isn't sure what he's trying to get out of it. Her remorse? Her care?

"I don't think so," she says. "Besides, if I did, I would never trust your motives, anyway."

"No," he says, and the look he gives her pulls against her skin. It cuts her like her ice, and for the life of her she can't feel any differently, even when she knows she should feel nothing. _"_ You will never trust me."

Because his look, underneath the smirk that is not arrogant—in fact, it is pitiful and barren, as though he has no energy left to make it full of his usual sneering narcissism—and underneath the white reflection of snow that surrounds them in his bright, green eyes, is sadness. She only knows because she's so intimately acquainted with the emotion, and because staring at each other is what they spend so much time doing.

He reaches a hand up and runs his fingers over her fringe, tucking her stray hair behind her ear. They stare at one another for a long time, hiding behind the snowdrift. It protects them from the eyes of the stars and the moonlight.

"When will you leave me?" he asks her eventually. "You've stayed much longer than usual."

She glances at her arms, and she can still feel the pressure of his lips on the inside of her elbow. She wonders when this dynamic between them evolved into this mangled mess. When she looks at him and the melancholy that borders his face, she wants to feel that deep fissure of burning hatred. It used to fill her like lava. The magma seems to be cooling under the implosion of her ice, and she doesn't like it.

"This will end soon," she says. "I've let this go too far."

Instead of answering her, he says, "You said my name, tonight."

Her stomach curls. She did. She moaned his name. "I didn't scream."

"No," he says, and his smirk is back. "But you said my name. That was what I really wanted."

She frowns at him. "I thought you wanted to break me."

He looks at her for a moment, his smirk turning wry and the melancholy still hanging along the edges. "I think we've both broken a little bit, Elsa."

She begins to panic again. She stands up quickly, grabbing her clothes and shoving them back onto her body.

"Does it frighten you, Elsa, that you might not hate me?"

"No," she hisses at him. "I do hate you. I will never like you. I will never forgive you. You can keep your delusions if you want, because there's not much else to think about in here, is there? Isn't that what you said?"

He says nothing as she combs her fingers through her hair and readjusts her nightgown. He says nothing as she leaves, but she feels his eyes follow her as she walks towards the door. She waves an angry hand, and the snow and icicles vanish, leaving the room spotless and clean. It is as if all of what they have done to each other in this cell vanishes with it.

Halfway to her room, his face invades her mind. In her bed, his words trickle through her ears. They taunt her.

_Does it frighten you, Elsa, that you might not hate me?_

* * *

When she does eventually go back to Hans, she stands at the cell doors for a few minutes. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. When she enters, Hans is standing at the cell window again. Before he turns around, she says, "This is the last time."

He glances to her over his shoulder. "Are you certain?"

No, she wants to say. She's never certain about anything concerning him.

"Like you said, I think we've both gotten what we wanted. Not exactly how we planned, but we did."

He walks over to her, and they stand in the middle of the room. It is blistering when they are face to face, eyes scalding and intense.

"You finally said my name last time," he says.

"Is that your definition of breaking me?"

He smiles. "You lost control enough. You let yourself go enough. So, yes, I would call that breaking."

"And what is yours?" she asks. "Your breaking?"

He touches her cheek, and she stands as still as she can. Frost builds in her palms in case she needs it to push him away, in case he begins to dig any deeper under her skin.

"Oh, you already know it, Elsa. Don't you see?"

His eyes try to coax the answer out of her. She thinks she knows—but it's a bit too terrifying.

"You're mistaking physical pleasure for something that it's not," she says.

He shrugs. "Isn't that what you wanted to fool me into believing?"

"I didn't even know you could believe in something like that."

He laughs abruptly. "You're right. I didn't either. I guess you should be applauded. You've twisted me beyond belief."

She steps back from him. "You're a liar."

He follows her. "I know you'll never believe a thing I say. What did you say last time? This doesn't matter because it doesn't mean anything?" He brushes her bangs out of her eyes, leaning forward and pressing his lips to her ear. "Then let me show you how much it doesn't mean to me."

Ice forms into a ball in her fist. "Get away from me."

He ignores her. "The sex we have isn't violent. I forget who we are every time. I always want you to feel the pleasure you came here for—it used to be for control but that's not what it's about anymore. Hell, I kissed you when I didn't even know I wanted to."

A blast of ice pushes him back like a shove. He lands on the floor with a grunt.

"Stop it," she says. "I don't care what you think. You're right. You're broken, and you're mad, and you're right where I wanted you to be. This is the last time."

He grimaces up at her. "Don't act like I'm alone in this. You keep coming back because you _need_ me."

Her fists become ice cubes. Her heart becomes a glacier. Even if he's lying to her, she can see him for what he is: a man whittled down to nothing but his flesh and bone, all alone except for the punches of her guards and the physical attachments they create for one another. The moon haunts him, the stars taunt him with dreams he will never have. Her ice gives him another kind of freedom, just as his touch lessens her burden of power.

She stalks to him and stands above him. His nostrils flare as he looks up at her, and there is a cloud of anger between them, a furnace emanating. It is a charge that hums through the room.

"This will be the last time," she says. A cuff of ice curls around his neck, and his breath puffs out in plumes.

"Will you replace me with another prince?" he asks. His hand finds her ankle, wrapping around it in his palm. "Trust me. You're going to miss this."

"I won't miss your arrogance," she answers.

His glare turns into a smirk, and he pulls her leg. Her knee buckles, and she ends up straddling his hips.

"You'll miss our passion," he says.

" _I_ will? I think _you_ will."

Hans grins up at her, reaching up to touch her face.

"Yeah. I will."

Then he grips the back of her neck and pulls her down toward him. He kisses her for the second time, and it is not gentle or sweet. Elsa is so shocked that it takes her a moment to realize what he's doing. Her eyes snap open when his tongue invades her mouth.

She pushes back forcefully and goes to slap him, but he catches her wrist. Ice flies down her hand to his forearm, his shoulder, his neck.

"What do you think you're doing?" she seethes.

Hans coughs and chokes against her pressure. "It's the last time. What does it matter?"

So flippant. So careless. What does it matter?

She peels her ice back from him slowly, and his chest heaves with large breaths.

"Fine," she says. "You're right. What does it matter?"

She steels herself as she grips the sides of his head. She feigns confidence as she always does with new things, and she presses her lips to his. It's different when initiating the kiss. There's power in it, but it's also sensitive and soft. It's a silly thing, really. It's only coupling a small amount of skin together. It's nothing compared to what they've done before, but it's electric all on its own. Words are stemmed and quieted as they form a current between their open mouths, pushed back down into their throats. A rush runs through them, her chest on his, their lungs pushing into each other. His tongue enters her mouth with little probing, their breaths intermingling. His warmth clashes against her chill. He moans into her and she sighs and as they lie on the cold, hard floor together, it feels as if they could care.

As they peel off their clothes, their mouths connect, hungry and insatiable, just as much as the rest of their bodies—their stomachs, their arms, her legs around his hips. Her nails dig into the backs of his shoulders, and the ice cuts into him like knives. He pushes into her deeper and deeper, closer than he's ever gotten, and Elsa cocoons them inside the shell of her power. They are one being, suddenly, as his hands cradle her in large palmfuls, as her thighs squeeze his sides. They give and take in equal measure, and everything from before is gone. There is no pain, no hatred, no arrogance or bravado. They are stripped down to what they've hidden from each other for so long, down to their bare bones. They give and take in equal measure, not caring about the infliction of pain or the troubling consequences of relinquishing control, because in this moment, what does it matter?

When they lie together in the cocoon of snow and ice, insulated from the outside and warm from the heat of their pounding blood, it feels like it could have mattered, once.

It could have mattered, if things had been different.

"You could kill me, you know," Hans says when the frantic haze has died down. "I don't think I'd mind."

She eyes him. "Kill you?"

He looks up at the ceiling. "I have nothing else. The means of death is the only thing I do have, and I don't think I'd want death to find me any other way." He smirks at her. "You've already given me a pretty kind of freedom with this. Pain and torture and pleasure." He runs a finger down her forearm, which has mostly healed from their last encounter. "The only other thing I want is death. Death by your ice sounds poetic."

He says it like he's taking about the weather. He is nonchalant and apathetic, aloof, inscrutable.

"You really want me to kill you?" she says after a moment, watching his fingers trail her skin. "That's really what you want?"

Hans catches her eyes and holds them for a long time, searching.

"Yes."

The one word is as simple as it is serious. Elsa begins to feel her eyes fog. She crystallizes her tears so they won't fall.

"I...I can't do that, Hans."

He smiles at her sadly, thumbing her cheek. "Sure, you can."

"No," she whispers. "I can't."

He stares at her for a while before gently grasping her wrists. He brings her palms around to hold the sides of his head. "I know what it feels like," he says. "It's not that bad. It's like going to sleep."

She frowns at him. Her teeth begin to clench.

"Stop it," she says.

"Just a zap," he continues. "It would be quick. Right through my head."

Elsa begins to shake her head. Her throat constricts, and her words are barricaded.

"Come on, Elsa," he says, a heat behind his words. The melancholy of his eyes evolve into anger and desperation. She can finally see despondency pooling in his pupils. "Come on. No one would care."

"I wish I could," she finally breathes. "I wish I could."

"Please." He pushes her palms harder and harder. She feels the give of the tender skin of his temples. "Do it. Please."

She has never seen him this way. His jaw is buckled, and his green eyes are tinged with red, and there is self-loathing in them—another kind of hate, another kind of want, very particular brands of emotion.

"Hans," she whispers, and she is not sure what to say. She desperately wishes the monster would come back. The anger, the hate, the fissure in her stomach. It would make it all so easy. She would relish his misery and his pain. The deep, sudden and abrupt pain. Deeper than the physical. More than she could possibly inflict by her own two hands.

She would have loved it, once, would have grinned a sharp, unforgiving smile, because she realizes, in that instant, that he had been truthful. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he had been truthful.

He is broken. His pieces are on the floor. They glitter up at her like shards of her ice.

"I don't want to be here anymore," he tells her. "I don't want to be here."

One tear falls down her cheek, then two.

"I'm sorry," she says. It's all she can offer. A meek apology in the face of his plea.

Finally, his hands relieve their pressure on hers. Her fingers begin to tingle with life, restricted from blood flow with his hold.

He reaches down to wipe away her tears. He is kind under the umbrella of his sorrow. It cloaks him, and she can finally see him.

"It doesn't matter," he says. "Just like everything else."

"I wish it did," she chokes. She's empty and bereft. That ugly passion, that atrocious shadow behind her soul had built and built, had grown outside of her skin like a specter. Where could it have gone? How did it leave her?

She wonders if it's crumbled somewhere, dismantled under the threshold of this cell. Perhaps it has broken free, torn out of her veins just like her ice.

Just like her heart.

* * *

Elsa keeps her word. It is the last time. She may still be growing into her role as queen, but she is nothing if not loyal to herself.

Hans doesn't see her again, but he is surprised when two months later, his guard arrives to his cell, begrudgingly holding a small briefcase and a satchel. He has a twisted scowl on his face, as though he has pulled the short straw and would rather be anywhere else.

"The Queen has made a... _decision_ about your fate, prisoner, he mutters. He sets the briefcase down and reaches to his side to unclip the ring of dungeon keys from his belt.

"You will be escorted from Arendelle to the closest neighboring country. You are not to cross country lines. You are not to show your face here or anywhere where the queen will be. You will not pass into the Southern Isles, as that restriction will still be in place from the agreement between Arendelle and your home country. If you break any of these prohibitions, you will be arrested forthwith, imprisoned, and executed. Do you understand?"

Hans stares at the man, quickly trying to accept all the words thrown at him. He takes in the briefcase, the keys that are now being placed into the lock.

Does he understand? Not hardly.

"...yes," he says. "I understand."

"Wonderful," the guard harrumphs, throwing the cell door open. He throws the briefcase into Hans' chest. Hans elicits a surprised and forced _oof._

"You will change into the clothes in the briefcase. I will then escort you out of the castle and into the forest. The satchel contains provisions that will keep you sustained for a number of days. Do you understand?"

Hans blinks, and he feels as dumb as he must look. He nods, opens the briefcase and quickly changes. Once finished, the guard roughly grips one of Hans' wrists and leads him through an old, cobwebbed pathway. There are no windows, and shadows absorb them until they come upon a rusted door. The guard pushes it open, sighs, and they continue along a backroad into the changing leaves of the forest. Autumn is in full swing, and Hans is disoriented, trying to regain his bearings of the world.

They walk one mile or two, but it feels like a boundless trudge with infinite trees and foliage, before the guard shoves him without decorum. Hans stumbles to the ground, cushioned by dead leaves and twigs.

"Legends say this place is full of magic," the guard says. "Arendelle's prisoners used to be taken out here, instead of holding cells. Magic eats at the brain, makes men turn animal." His beady eyes rove over Hans with disdain decorating his mustache. "Or maybe it's because they got lost, couldn't find their way out of here. This forest is a maze if you don't know the way. Regardless, I hope you rot," the guard says in farewell, turning and stalking through the trees. Soon, his footsteps become faint and silent, drowned out by the sounds of wildlife.

 _I hope you rot._ The words take him back to Elsa's, from such a long time ago. _You will no longer be a_ _man,_ she had said. _You will no longer be the man who you are or were. You will no longer know yourself._

Hans wonders if it's true about this place, then immediately begins to hope it's true. If Elsa's magic wouldn't eat his soul, he'll take the second best option. Perhaps it is this forest, leaves red like his spilled blood, left cleaned and forgotten in the small, congested walls of his cell, that will take his life. And when it does, he will imagine Elsa's frost, trickling into his brain like an endless sleep.

Because it could have mattered, once. And if he could have cared about anyone but himself, he is certain it would have been different.

As he lies on the forest floor, the arms of the trees stretched out overhead, he thinks about her face, the burning passion and hate and want and torture. He thinks about how she said his name. He thinks about her ice and her tears and how she couldn't kill him. She couldn't kill him, but he died in that cell.

He knows he did, because he loved her, anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got such amazing feedback and kudos for this story, and while I had no intention of continuing this, another scene popped into my head that I just couldn’t let go, and I thought—okay great, now I have to write it out.  
> The tone might be a little different than the first, but I tried to keep it in the same vein. The first one can always be standalone, too, so if you hate this, then just act like it never happened. Like all sequels. LOL.  
> Also, this is shorter. I didn’t have another 20K emotional smut fest in me (they’ve been through enough, haven’t they? …No?), but I did kind of get swept away with fleshing out the world and feelings that aren’t as inextricably associated with lust. I'm a sucker for happy endings. And don’t worry, there’s still smut. This is ungodly on Easter weekend, but here I am, anyway.  
> Stay safe and healthy. Times are weird, and I adore everyone of you. Happy reading!

The forest doesn’t kill him.

The first week, Hans desperately wills it to eat his soul and rupture his mind. He’s already half-crazy, so it shouldn’t take much to bowl over the rest of his sanity like a flimsy tower of sticks. He waits for it to happen as he walks and walks, trudging deeper into the endless forest, wondering what country he’s in and not caring the minute after he wonders.

He runs out of food five days in. It lasts much longer than he thought, and he thinks about Elsa, thinks about her packing his satchel of food. Did she hope he’d survive? Did she end up caring about him after all? Did she regret?

By the time he passes out from exhaustion and fatigue, he’s closer to losing his mind from his own thoughts than from the magic in the forest. Being the victim of Elsa’s magic must have built up his immunity, because the magic of the forest feels nonexistent. It doesn’t touch him like she did. He tastes it on his tongue like a dash of sugar, just enough to sate his withdrawal. It is a brief tease, his sternum hollow as soon as it dissipates. He closes his eyes and craves her, his belly writhing with an unnamable ache.

His last thought before unconsciousness is that she’s ruined him.

_You will no longer know yourself.  
  
_

* * *

  
He comes to in a bedroom. It is sparsely furnished, drab with muted browns and yellows. There is a lingering chill, as if the owners were too cheap or poor to build adequate insulation. His immediate thought is that he died and must be in some kind of purgatory, because as plain as the room is, it’s missing the flames and boiling heat of Hell.  
  
He eventually learns he is in a guest room in a tavern. Two men, hunting in the forest, came upon him. Finding him still alive, they ushered him to the closest settlement, calling on a healer in the port town, and fearing the worst.  
  
“You were paler’n death, lad,” the tavern keeper tells him, his wife beside him. They both seem worried about him, the wife wringing her hands, the frown lines deep around the man’s goatee. Hans muses he must still look on the verge of passing to the afterlife.  
  
“I’m fine,” he iterates, voice crackly and rough. He realizes how hungry and thirsty he is. The wife hands him a tankard of water and he drinks it so quickly, he coughs up half of it.  
  
When they ask him about where he’s from, his family and who to notify, he feigns amnesia. _Must have been the magic of the forest,_ the tavernkeeper states sagely, his eyebrow darkened with shadow. Hans lets them assume what they will, their fiction much more presumptive than the tale he could spin on his own. If they are suspicious about his convenient amnesia, they don’t specify. A week into his new role, Hans realizes that not everyone is as paranoid or as wary about newcomers as he. He’s forgotten that not everyone has an ulterior motive. Not everyone schemes. Not everyone is running from their past.  
  
There is such a thing as ordinary.  
  
The town is San Sequin, in the country of Grakkęt. It is a bustling place, surrounded by several outlets to sea and a port. Travelers come and go often, so Hans’ arrival is obscured by the hustle of business ventures and tourism.  
  
He works for the tavern keeper for a while, manning the bar and waiting on customers with the three different meals offered from the cook. _Different_ is a stretch. All dishes are a mix of dumplings, potatoes, the variety emphasized by the choice between three meats.  
  
After a month, the place seems too cozy. It is utterly warm, welcoming, and foreign. The tavern keeper and his wife are old enough for him to be their son, and when the wife smiles at him, red cheeked and plump, he feels like he is stealing her kindness and her matronly accommodation. If she knew who he was, would she still smile that way?  
  
He leaves to another part of the town. He takes a job as a bartender at an establishment by the port. It is full of sailors, roughened visitors, and more than one shady character. The atmosphere is smoky and gray, filled with the gritty, ashy tang of cigars and regret. There are deals made in corners and contracts signed in blood. No one smiles at him. No one pats his shoulder and no one places a comforting palm on his own.  
  
This place suits him much better.  
  
When a year passes, Hans finally begins to lower his guard. He begins to forget his past life. He begins to think he can allow himself to start over—completely, irrevocably—without remembering the crackle of Elsa’s magic as a threatening hum in his skull.  
  


* * *

  
Her arrival is swift and quiet and unnoticed, a gentle breeze flicking between a single column of leaves on a tree.  
  
The tavern is the last place she stops after a trying day of fruitless searching. Her magic is good for locating scents and tracks of wild animals. Gale is the other element who helps her, bringing back whispers and snippets of conversation from passersby. The others, fire and earth, are too conspicuous, but utilized together in the old shrine on the North Sea, she was able to use the only thing of Hans she had left—her memories. The ghosts of sensation and the ruthless scarring in her heart.  
  
With magic, their currency was a potent down payment. They gave her the town where he resided, and now the only thing left was to find him. The thing she doesn’t anticipate is how difficult it is to find someone who doesn’t want to be found.  
  
She enters the tavern with weary eyes, her oversized cloak heavy and thick across her shoulders. The hood falls over her face, hiding her eyes and platinum hair. Her hair gleams like a beacon with as rare a color as it is, but with a furtive glance around the tavern and its occupants, she deems it safe to push the hood down.  
  
The host bustles from behind the check-in desk. Her face is open and kind, cushioned with happiness and an easy smile. The apples of her cheeks are flushed, her bosom generous. She has the look of someone who could offer you a cup of tea and sit with you while you spill out the tragedy of your life, offering a plate of cookies all the while.  
  
“A room for one, please,” Elsa says, placing the required coin on the counter.  
  
“Of course, dearie,” she answers, walking towards the wall of hooks. She chooses an elegant brass key, embossed with the number 3. “What brings you to San Sequin? I hope your travels have treated you kindly. The roads are not so gentle for young women alone, I’m afraid.”  
  
Elsa rode her water horse the whole way and it was nothing but gentle, however lengthy. She does not indulge the woman with that information. Instead, she smiles politely and says, “I’m looking for someone.”  
  
The woman’s eyes light with interest. “Oh? We encounter many travelers and tourists, and we’ve lived here long enough to be acquainted with most of the business folk. Per chance I could help you.”  
  
Elsa’s weariness succumbs to a small spark of hope. She relates the description she’s been using all afternoon.  
  
“I’m looking for a young man. He has auburn hair, green eyes, and is a few inches taller than me. He has a light complexion with faint freckling along his nose. He’s—“  
  
She thinks of the last look he had given her. Resigned, hopeless, and full of exhausted anger.  
  
“He can be charming if he wants to be,” she finishes.  
  
The woman’s face puckers with thought, but her eyebrows raise in question.  
  
“Was his name Hendrick?” she asks.  
  
“I—“ Elsa hesitates. It’s a name she hasn’t heard yet today, but the lady’s look is evolving. The more she stares at Elsa, the more and more her lips curl up into a smile of certainty. “I don’t have a name, I’m afraid.”  
  
“Hm,” the lady ponders. “We had a man who was delivered to us about a year ago, matches your description. He said his name was Hendrick. Poor thing had a nasty bout of amnesia and was half-starved. Some hunters found him in the forest on the southern edge of town and brought him here because our lodging was closest. The healer is only a few blocks away, so it was an easy thing to call on her.” She frowns. “He didn’t have any belongings. No pictures, no family crest. Just an empty satchel and dirty clothes.”  
  
Elsa’s heart thuds.  
  
“Does he work here?” Her eyes flit around the tavern again, a stroke of tempered fear scratching her stomach.  
  
The woman sighs as if pained. “No. He used to. Then one day, he just up and left. Said he overstayed our generosity. Not that he did. I tried to persuade him to stay but we couldn’t change his mind.”  
  
Elsa glances again at the gentle curves of her face. She thinks she might know why Hans left.  
  
“I appreciate your information. It certainly...sounds like him. Do you know where he’s working now?”  
  
The lady huffs. “It’s called The Dirty Clam, near the easternmost ports. It’s one of those rest stops for sailors and tourists who would like something more...illicit, but they have an agreement with the local authorities and it gives ‘em lucrative trades. Since it’s near the last port, it makes it a very handy place to make a run for it.” She shakes her head, and her dismay is obvious. “Never was quite sure of the appeal of the place. He seemed like a good lad but wasn’t one to open up. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure about that amnesia, either.”  
  
Her eyes glint as she looks at Elsa. “If you don’t mind me askin’, how d’you know ‘im?”  
  
Elsa opens her mouth, hesitating before choosing on her words.  
  
“He came to my city. He was a visitor, and...my sister got swept up with him. The courtship ended, but him and I became...friends.”  
  
The lady’s eyes remain intrigued, but even Elsa knows how it might sound.  
  
“You’re his friend, but you don’t know his name?”

Elsa smiles uneasily. “I am attempting as much discretion as I can, ma’am. I’m sure you understand.”

“I understand _secrets._ Very well. He was always keeping to himself, putting his head down and working. He would have gone unnoticed by townsfolk, though a few more gals would visit our tavern after he started work. He never seemed rightly interested, and now I think I know why.” She grins toothily at Elsa, and Elsa glances at the counter, unsure how to feel at the deduction.  
  
“We were only friends, Miss...”  
  
“Matilda,” she answers before shaking her head. She passes the key to Elsa, who takes it gratefully. “Friends or not, I hope you find ‘im, whether it’s for closure or something else. And do be careful if you go to that Dirty Clam. It isn’t nice to women.”  
  
“I believe I can handle myself, thank you.” Elsa places the key in her pocket, nodding to the woman before taking her leave. Her weariness has dissipated with the conversation, replaced with renewed purpose. She pulls her hood back up as she slips out of the tavern, heading towards the ports with a nervous beat to her steps.  
  


* * *

  
Hans takes another deep drag from the imported cigar. Until recently, he hadn’t known the appeal of them. His father would indulge in them, occasionally, after brokering deals with other countries. His father got the habit from his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before him. It seems that partaking in cigars is a linear activity, and Hans despised himself, at first, for caving into the temptation. In the beginning, the taste had been foul, nothing more than reminiscent of campfire smoke and soot. Now, he can identify the floral and honey notes that predominate the far away land of Corona. The smoke is heavy and thick like a three course dinner, filling up his lungs with a redolent nostalgia for somewhere he’s never been. He blows the smoke out of his nose, and it burns like a forgotten dream.

He likes cigars, and he hates that he does. He’s followed his family line. He can imagine his father sneering at the idea of him sharing such a royal delicacy, incensed and repulsed in only the dramatic way his father can be. Hans smiles spitefully, wishing his father could see him. He takes one more inhale, then he flicks the butt to the ground, stamping it out with his booted foot. He glances out towards the docks for the rest of his work intermission, enjoying the view. The sea stretches out from the bay like a dark, treacherous blanket, its waves calm this evening. Boats and ships rock against their berths, the wooden _thumps_ creating a gentle song with the splash of salt water.

Kerosene lamps glow along the banks and the cobblestone lanes. Golden yellow and burnished orange flames highlight the slopes of the streets, creating depthless shadows between the buildings. Several windows are lit, hinting at the activities inside the line of shops. Most are closing, the only ones still open are the bars and gambling dens. Most of it is illegal, but it’s another source of income that boosts the economy thrice-fold. Hans reaps the benefits, so he can’t complain.

It’s never quiet, here. Muffled curses, drunken songs, and hollers of pleasure or pain consistently punctuate the night. Hans should be used to it by now, but he hasn’t fully succumbed to naming this new place a home. Oddly, in times like these, he misses the solitude of his cell in Arendelle. At least when he was alone, he didn’t have to deal with drunken, vindictive idiots.

He takes a clean breath of the salty night air, turning to the backdoor of the bar, and returning to his post behind the counter, polished with grease, spit, and spilled brandy.

An hour or two into the second part of his shift, Ward hobbles in and takes his regular seat. He’s a burly man, skin weathered from the incessant exposure to the sun, with shining, faux gold buckles holding up his frayed suspenders. Tan, burlap trousers tuck into his right, knee-high boot, his left pant leg hastily torn, showing a peg leg in place of a shin.

“Ay, Red,” Ward says. “We’s a shipment goin’ out at dawn. It’s double the normal caseload, and the money’s good. The cut will be at least thirty percent more than the last. We could use yer extra hands if yer interest’d.”

Hans pulls the man’s favorite poison from the middle shelf. A rye whiskey, the spice of it enough to burn an esophagus so badly, it forms ulcers as soon as it hits the throat. Or so Ward says. Hans hasn’t had the inclination to try it himself.

“I have no plans,” Hans says, filling up three fingers in the glass. He passes it to Ward. “Where to?”

Ward takes a pull. “That pretty place called Arendelle. It’s closer distance by land travel, but there’s too much cargo to be inconspic’us ‘bout it.”

Hans smirks and grimaces simultaneously. The money might persuade him, but he’d rather stay as far away from Arendelle as he can. He absently wonders if Elsa knows her country loves drugs just as much as any other.

“I’ll think about it.”

Ward eyes him. “The money’s too good for you to have to _think_ about it, man.”

Hans shrugs. “Rent’s cheap, here.”

“Never was a reason before. Shipment never gave you pause before. What’s it? The destination?”

Ward is missing five teeth—he tells his stories on every voyage—but it doesn’t mean he’s any less perceptive. He’s lived through dozens of scrapes as a pirate, and sheer luck was not the only thing that helped him. Hans was shocked to find that Ward was, actually, smart.

“It’s not my favorite place,” Hans hedges.

“Ah,” Ward says, leaning against the counter. His peppered hair is shaggy, waving along his temples. “Well, did ya hear? Queen Anna rules there, now. Took her sister’s place, she did. Elsa abdic’ted.”

Hans blinks at him. Elsa? Abdicated?

“Really? What happened?”

Ward shrugs. “Alls I know is that Elsa was said to have found another calling. Queen of Arendelle didn’t suit her. Somethin’ about a forest and magic, but I don’t rightly believe all that.” Ward takes another swig of his drink, oblivious to Hans’ fading color and slackened jaw. “So, will you tell me what’s wrong with Arendelle?”

Hans tries to stop thinking about the news of Elsa. A forest? Magic? “No.”

“Humor an old man. You know most of my esc’pades. Give me one of yers! Yer so young, it’s a wonder you have any.”

“Trust me, _old man_. I’m not telling you or any of the other shipmates. What do you always say? Blackmail is a pirate’s favorite currency.”

Ward belts a laugh then drains the rest of his glass and laughs some more. “Oi. Fine. Haves it yer way, Red. One day, we’ll get you so sloshed you’ll have no choice but to spill yer guts.”

That’s a terrifying thought. What would Hans say if he was blackout drunk? _I fucked a queen in my prison cell after I attempted to murder her and usurp her throne._ He might even regale the sex tales. Hans is sure that’s the kind of story they live to hear, though no one on their ship believes anyone as far as they can throw them.

Hans wouldn’t believe _Hans_ if he heard the story.

“Sure, Ward.”

Another patron sits at the end of the bar, and Hans steps away from Ward to retrieve their order. The figure is in a thick, dark navy cloak. The temperature this season is mild at worst, and the heat inside the bar is stifling at best. Hans wonders how they can be comfortable and immediately becomes suspicious. No one covers themselves up unless they don’t want to be seen here.

“What do you like?” Hans asks the patron. They’re of slight build—the cloak creates the illusion of a larger stature, but the curve of their back and how they sit in the stool hints at femininity.

The patron shifts, and the shadow of the hood continues to cover their eyes. He sees their lips, and he knows at once that they’re lips of a woman.

“A conversation,” the woman says.

Hans freezes. Her voice haunts his dreams. Her eyes linger on him in the moonlight when he tries to sleep. _Speak of the devil, and the devil shall appear._

She shifts again, and the eyes he imagines peek out from underneath her hood. Their cerulean is darker in the lighting of the bar, under its smoky haze. They are almost as navy as her cloak.

Hans can’t move his limbs. He can only stare at her. He wants to mistake her for a ghost, but her eyes are too brilliant to be a figment of his own conjuring, and her skin is not translucent. It is as pale and shimmering as an opal.

He straightens his back against the wall of his shock.

“I’m afraid I only sell libations.”

She eyes him up and down. “Hendrick, is it?”

“That is what they call me.” His skin hums with magic, but it must be all in his mind. Her hands are free of gloves. No ice threads crawl along the counter. “What’s a lady like you doing here? Not many come willingly alone to this place.”

“So I’ve heard,” she says, leaning forward. “I think I can manage quite well on my own.”

“I’m certain you can.”

Hans thinks for a wild moment that she’s here to arrest him and put him to death. Does she know he’s a drug mule? Did she overhear his conversation with Ward? Did she truly abdicate?

She’s too hidden from view for him to tell if she’s changed. The only thing he can manage is seeing the deep sparkle of her eyes underneath the grimy kerosene lamps overhead. He glances around the room, but he does not see anyone acting as a guard or protector, not in the corners of the room. No furtive glances are thrown their way. Hans’ shock lingers. Elsa was reckless with him and reckless with herself when protecting her sister, but never had he seen her reckless with anything else. How was she able to receive permission to leave her kingdom to come to _this_ place?

Yet, if she did abdicate, she can now do whatever she pleases. His mind quickly rummages through all the memories of her that he’s pushed away, attempting to forget them behind the other boxes of his past. The way she stood before him, freezing him, putting him through a provocative torture, nourishing his body with her own. The fire in her eyes, underlying her ice. The proud line of her spine. The ruptured veins of her forearms. How she murdered him softly.

She’s surprised him more than anyone else he’s ever known. Of course she abdicated. She’s found her own freedom.

“Matilda told me where to find you,” she says.

“She’s easily charmed.”

“She’s kind,” Elsa counters. “Is that why you stopped working there?”

Hans clenches his jaw. “You didn’t come all this way to ask me why I’m not working at Matilda’s tavern. Why are you here?”

Elsa wavers for all of two seconds before she says, “I’m here to forgive you of your crimes and terminate the legal restraints against you. You will now be free to enter the country lines of the Southern Isles and Arendelle should you so choose.”

Hans stares at her. An abrupt laugh bursts from his mouth before he tries to catch his sanity. “Come again?”

“You’re forgiven,” she emphasizes, though her voice is quiet. Her face is quiet, too. She gives him nothing substantial to grasp, no clue as to what she’s feeling. She had gotten so good about tempering her emotions when she visited him in his cell. It does not seem as though she’s lost the art over the past year.

This must be her last duty as queen, he thinks. She must no longer be burdened, all regrets and trespasses wiped clean, her future as beautiful and tempting as a blank slate.

“Good,” he states. Another regular sits at the counter, and it gives Hans an excuse to break eye contact with her. He reaches for a clean glass and a crystal bottle of gin. He’s never understood the logic behind putting something so detrimental inside such an expensive casing.

He pours a double and trades it for a few coins. He allows Elsa a cursory glance before he tells her, “If you don’t want a drink, feel free to leave. There’s no reason for you to stay if you’re not going to pay.”

Her stare drills into his skin. “What time do you finish?”

“Was a year too long of a dry spell?”

Finally, she grimaces at him. “For you, I’m sure.”

He smirks and relents. “Two a.m.”

“I’ll wait.” She throws a generous bill in front of her onto the countertop.

Hans grabs it and lifts it up to the lighting, thoroughly examining its authenticity. “Now that I’m free, is this payment for what you want to do with me later?”

“Han—" she pauses. “Hendrick, please.”

“Please? That sounds like you’re begging.”

Her uncertainty breaks through for a blessed moment. She crosses her arms over her chest, and for the first time since they’ve spoken, she looks away. That’s all Hans needed. He feels the hum again, but it isn’t because of magic. It’s the vibrating buzz in his chest and the crackle in his skull.

He’s missed her. He’s missed her desperately.

“Don’t talk to anyone,” he tells her, filling up a glass with water. He stays out of earshot of the other patrons. “They won’t leave you alone if you do.”

Then he sets the glass of water in front of her, if only to keep her hands from idling. He notices her chill the glass before she takes a drink, but no one else takes heed.

Magic, right under their noses, and none of these fools can see.  
  


* * *

  
She waits the rest of the evening, roosting on her barstool. She watches him half the time, and she watches the patrons the other half of the time. Their eyes catch for several instances, the dark, lurid blue pinching the air out of his lungs. He begins to wonder if all those cigars had been a bad idea.

A handful of men go up to her, sitting in the empty stool beside her. As oversized as the cloak is, it doesn’t seem to deter them. The men in this place can sense a female like a piranha smelling blood.

Hans lingers close by when the first few men approach, but he needn’t have bothered. Elsa told the truth when she said she could manage on her own. Her glares were otherworldly, and though Hans couldn’t hear the words she told them, they must have been sharp enough to cut out their hearts. Only one man seemed angry enough to raise a hand to strike her, but he wizened, cut his losses, and left.

“You’re good at rejection,” Hans says, once. He means it as a joke.

“I’ve had good practice,” she answers, and they stare at one another again. Hans can feel his insides churning. The urge to touch her is devastating. He sighs, turns away, and continues the monotonous chore of cleaning, pouring, and taking money.

A single fight occurs all night, and Hans counts his lucky stars. There are usually three on a good night. The fight that does happen is easy enough to break up. Hans grabs them by the cuffs of their shirts and throws them out like sacks of garbage to be shuttled away in the morning.

When two a.m. rolls around, Blanca, Hans’ boss’s mistress walks in for the skeleton shift. She winks at Hans, coming up to him behind the bar and playfully running her fingers up his arm. She’s twenty years younger than the boss. She proclaims her love for him is an unending, undying thing, but she always ruffles his hair and drapes herself over him when they intersect paths on their shifts. She’s the only girl who is a consistent presence here in the bar, but the boss is always around when she is, keeping the belligerent customers at bay. Hans hears his heavy boots creaking on the stairs, signaling the end of Hans’ shift.

When Hans glances at Elsa, his stomach curls up like burning paper, and he suddenly wants to mop the floors and clean the chimney. Anything. Anything to get away from her. Anything to avoid the unknown of what will happen next.

He comes up beside her, gesturing toward the door. She follows him out into the cool, heavily darkened night, and she reaches up and pulls her hood down. Her platinum hair spills out like an overturned glass, spreading out across her back in abundant tendrils. It’s never looked so loose and unkempt, not even after their sessions together in his cell. He runs a hand over his face.

“You’re a peace keeper,” she says.

“What?”

“You keep the order, you look out for everyone, and you manage the bar. I never thought you’d take a job with so much responsibility.”

“You’ve got it wrong. There isn’t responsibility, not with the people who come in here. It’s more making sure no one does anything too stupid.”

“I politely disagree.”

“You could impolitely disagree.”

Her mouth twitches. She looks over him. “Hans…”

He glances out toward the empty lanes. “Did you abdicate?”

“Yes.”

Hans nods, the validation dulled after his earlier certainty. “Why?”

“I found my calling elsewhere. Being queen was quickly becoming something that I wasn’t…made for. It wasn’t me. My place is in the Enchanted Forest, now. I keep the peace between the Northuldra tribe of the forest and the people of Arendelle. Anna leads Arendelle, and she does quite well.”

“Northuldra?”

Elsa tells him of their story, Elsa and Anna rushing into the details of their past and how it was the key to their future. The forest called her home to its magical embrace.

“Magic is no longer a burden to me,” she says.

“No more ruptured veins?” he asks.

“No more ruptured veins.”

They walk. Hans follows her lead along the quiet streets. They pass by stone buildings, their windows dark and black like skeleton eyes, watching their trek between the bones of the sleeping town.

“You’ve found your purpose, then,” Hans ventures. She’s found it, and while she didn’t _need_ him, as she had forcefully said so many times before, he can’t help the decaying discomfort that twists in his stomach. “You’ve never needed me, so why are you here?”

“I have a sanctuary of magic. It shows me the memories of the past and potential memories of the future. I…give it my memories, and in turn, it helps me with what I ask.”

Hans raises a brow. He doesn’t quite understand the nuances of magic. Elsa’s ice he could understand. The hum of it, he could taste and feel, zapping into him like needles plunging into his fingertips. The kind of magic Elsa relates to him is a foreign concept.

“It is something I would have to show you. I can’t explain it—I could spend hours explaining and it would never be adequate.”

“Ah, so you came here to show me, then?” he replies. He can’t help his sarcasm. “This magical shrine in the northern reaches at the end of the world. Did you know that magic for us _normal_ people is supposed to addle the brain? Make us go insane?” He laughs, and it is loud against the shrouded night. “I was going to die in that forest. I thought, maybe the magic in there could end me when yours couldn’t. I thought it would be a kindness. A kindness to me and the rest of the world, and the most convenient kindness to you. If I no longer existed, you could forget everything we did to each other, just as you wanted.”

The words scrape against his throat. They ache.

“When I realized it was you, sitting there in the bar, I thought you came to finally finish what you started, what you couldn’t do before. Now, I think I was right.” He grasps at her wrists, and the sensation of her skin is a dark pleasure. It is a dichotomy of white hate and black love. He places one hand on his chest and the other at his temple. “Do you remember? It’s a little different, now. Two in the heart is worth one in the head. I’ve learned that here. The heart is harder to kill than the mind, so might as well make it count, _queen.”_

Her lips part. She’s staring at him with troubled eyes. She tries to pull away, but he holds her there. He can feel his heartbeat thundering all the way into his toes.

“Hans—”

“Do it.”

Steadily and slowly, a shimmer of ice scuttles out from beneath her hands. A network of fractals expand on his chest, and he feels the barest glimmer of it along the side of his face. It is a gentle caress, not a vicious impalement, and it makes him—it makes him so angry. The twist in his stomach tears open into a fault line, an endless pit of fire and lava.

“I won’t,” she says. There are no tears, this time. Her face is a fixture of certainty.

He shoves her hands away, snarling and trudging down the opposite direction. She hurries to catch up to him, placing herself in his path. He goes to walk around her, but she moves with him. He goes to push her aside, but she stops him with her ice, banding them around his wrists. The sensation is shocking and reminiscent, and his arms still.

“You will follow me,” she commands. The ice pushes into him like a threat.

He smiles meanly at her. “I’m not going to follow you.”

They glare at one another. The moon and stars watch them, out in the open, their eyes all-seeing. They no longer hide in a cell with one another. The world holds them in its palm.

Elsa steps forward, reaches around his neck and pulls him down. She kisses him.

It is a hard press. It is a moment, and then it is over. She steps away from him, and everything inside of him—the fire, the hate, the torment, the rage—sparks like a shooting star.

The ice around his wrists is no longer there.

“Follow me,” she says.

He does.  
  


* * *

  
She is in room number three.

Hans briefly thinks about irony. This is the same room he kept when he worked in the tavern. This world likes to play games with him, even if it is a game only he can see.

He enters behind her, and she locks the door. Her back is against it, her arms held behind her. He stands in the middle of the room, watching her. She is a statue of blue and platinum, unblemished marble. Can he crack it, this time? Can he break her? Shatter her? Obliterate her?

“Take off your cloak,” he says. He begins unbuttoning his shirt. “I’ll do the rest.”

She carefully pulls it over her head, lying it against the table beside the door. She’s wearing a dress—powder blue and too lovely for the journey she’s made. He drops his own shirt to the floor, and he steps closer to her. She silently turns around for him, and he sees the line of clasps. He undoes them one by one. He pushes down on the fabric, and the descent it makes across her skin ripples in the air like a sigh.

She steps out of the puddle of her dress and her shoes. He releases the buckle of her bra, and that falls away, too. Her back is a milky plane, stretching for an eternity. He comes forward until her back his against his chest, and he feels her shudder as she presses into him. He places his hands on her hips, his lips against the tender curl of her ear.

“Tell me what you want, Elsa,” he whispers. His mind is as dark as the room, his blood a black, restless thing.

She expels a breath, her delicate weight melding into his. “I want whatever you’ll give me.”

Her words ricochet along his bones.

_I want whatever you’ll give me._

He dips his mouth to the juncture of skin connecting her neck and her shoulder, and he moves a hand across the lower curve of her abdomen. She reaches a hand up to grasp the side of his head, her fingers threading into his hair. Her other lands on the hand on her hip.

He pushes his hand beneath the line of her underwear, finding her tender and wet, caressing the valleys of skin he once wished to forget. A flicker of ice trails out of her fingers, twists along his skull and embeds through his pores, and how will he forget this, now?

He breathes against her neck, and she bares it for him. He presses his finger harder, and she keens. Her bottom rubs against him as she writhes. Her legs tremble. Her ice flutters along his spine.  
  
“Oh,” she breathes. “I—I’m—“  
  
“You’re what?” he whispers, taunting. He slips his hand away from her, and she huffs with frustration.  
  
He spins her around and presses her against the door. His hips grind against her stomach. Her breath is strangled.  
  
He threads his fingers underneath the bands of her underwear, tugging them down. She steps out of them, her hands fumbling against the buttons of his trousers. Her hands are shaking, and he feels a rush of power from the sight of them—maybe it’s not only him. Maybe she’s losing her mind, too.  
  
He helps her, shoving his pants down his legs. He grabs her thighs and leverages her against the door, wrapping her legs around his waist. He doesn’t pause. He thrusts inside of her without decorum, abruptly and crazed. Her gasp is as sharp as a knife, cutting through the thick, heated air. Her fingers claw into him, desperately grasping. Her thighs squeeze and clench, and her magic encapsulates them, cooling their building heat, melting, and refreezing, over and over again until they are drenched in mist and sweat.

His rhythm is manic. The door rattles, and her breath punches out with the pressure. Hans does not want to be benevolent. He wants to be painful. He wants her to hurt. He wants her to feel what he does, cutting into her with his flesh, deeply and intimately, carving out a piece for himself. After this, he does not know what will happen. Will she leave him? Will she use him for this pleasure, as a newly freed man? Is that what she tells herself? That it’s okay, because he’s exonerated? Because she’s abdicated?

Because now, they are just _people?_

He’s close. She’s tightening. He feels every jerk, every tilt. Her cool breath in his ear. Her hair cascading around his shoulders like ribbons. She is a disease.

“Hans,” she moans, curling and twisting and releasing. One more thrust, one more squeeze, and he’s finished. Everything leaves him. His hands press against the wall surrounding her to support himself. His legs shut down, unable to hold them up. He slowly kneels to the floor, and she’s still in his arms as he lies on his back. The wood is hard and cold, every muscle flickering. His wick of energy is fading, and he sees spots cloud his vision.

Then he sees her face. She’s still on top of him, still holding him in her body. Her chest battles his with their heavy breathing, and she reaches up to hold his jaw before she tips forward and kisses him.

It is not a hard press. It is soothing, soft. She unwraps his lips, searching him with her tongue. It lasts and lasts and lasts, sweet and decadent and rich, and in the mad storm of his mind, he believes her to be carving out a piece of him, too.

“Hans,” she whispers, pulling back. She smiles down on him. “I love you.”

Hans says nothing, taken by the hands of sleep.  
  


* * *

  
When he wakes, he continues to dream.

Elsa is sprawled across his chest, her face nestled on his shoulder, her hair tickling his nose. Her breaths are even and deep. He’s always equated her with a mild chill, but they are warm as they lie on the floor. A thin sheet is draped across them, and Hans glances up at the bed to see it rumpled.

Hans blinks a few times, and he realizes he isn’t dreaming. Everything comes back to him in snippets, then it washes over him like a hurricane. He runs his free hand over his face and he sighs. He stares up at the ceiling, and he wonders what will happen when the serenity breaks.

Elsa hums awake eventually, the hand on his chest flicking to life. He feels her body shift with consciousness. She stills for a moment before she relaxes. She lifts her head and catches his eyes. She’s smiling at him, and it is sleepy and sluggish. “Good morning,” she greets.

_Hans, I love you._

He stares at her, and her smile begins to falter. “Are you okay?”

He imagines words he’s not sure he heard her say. Had he been asleep? Had he already been dreaming?

“Fine,” he says. “When are you leaving?”

Her face falls even further, and her content morning wakefulness is gone. “I…I don’t know.”

He turns to look at the window. The light is slanting at a high angle. He’s definitely missed the shipment this morning. Not that he would have gone, but now he doesn’t have the choice.

“I’m sure you’ll decide soon enough.” He shifts, and she slips her arm off his chest, untangling their bodies. Hans runs a hand through his hair before he stands and picks out his trousers.

“Hans—”

He buckles his pants, avoiding her gaze. He pushes his arms through his shirt, hastily buttoning. He’ll have to avoid Matilda and Jeremiah on the way out. Jeremiah is probably in his office, deep in his tea and bookings. Matilda is nearly omniscient. He doesn’t like his chances with her.  
  
“Come find me when you need more,” he says, combing his hair with his fingers. It feels messy and dented.  
  
“Hans, wait,” Elsa says, standing. She brings the blanket up with her, giving her some semblance of modesty. Hans is thankful she does. The room is lit with brilliant daylight, and he’s only ever seen her highlighted by the moon. What might he see in the sun? Too much, he thinks. So much he’ll never leave. “Stay for breakfast.”  
  
“Breakfast?” He glances at the bedsheet around her shoulders. “You mean, round two?”  
  
She frowns. “I mean, breakfast. Food. Eating.”  
  
“You already paid me last night, remember? I don’t require handouts from an ex-Queen last I checked.”  
  
Her eyebrows fall over her eyes in a glare. “That’s not what I mean. I just—I...”  
  
His stomach burns like there’s an acid leak. He may not have to go through with it, but he doesn’t trust any of this. He’s still recovering from his first heartbreak. There’s no need for a second.  
  
“When you figure it out, let me know. Or better yet, don’t. Leave. Go home to your forest,” he says, and he turns and walks out the door faster than she can respond.  
  
When he’s halfway down the stairs, he realizes she didn’t try to stop him. Not even with her ice.  
  
When he’s halfway across the tavern, he hears Matilda’s call. “Hendrick!”  
  
He pauses reluctantly, turning to greet her. He got further than he had imagined he would.  
  
He plasters on a smile as she bustles up to him, cheeks as rosy as they’ve always been. “Matilda. How are you?”  
  
“Surprised! I haven’t seen you in weeks, lad. How are _you?_ Staying out of trouble, I hope?”

Her perusal of him is quick yet thorough. He attempts to keep from nervously ruffling a hand through his bed ridden hair or over his wrinkled shirt.

“Haven’t been thrown in jail, so I guess I’m doing fine,” he says. Her eyes continually poke and prod him. “How’s Jeremiah?”

“Lousy and lazy,” she says, waving a hand. “I’m sure he’s sleeping in his office. How is the Dirty Clam? Still despicable?”

At that, Hans doesn’t have to fake his smile. “Still despicable. You should go and try it. No one would bother you. People there sense when a heart is too good.”

“Always the charmer, aren’t ya?” She glances behind him before giving him a sly look. “Tell me, were you coming in or leaving?”

Hans hesitates and tries to look unbothered. “What do you—”

“Hendrick! Wait!”

They both glance up to the stairway. Elsa is flying down the last steps, her hair cascading behind her. She’s wearing her cloak, and her feet slap against the wooden floorboards as she makes her way over to them.

“Oh, my dear!” Matilda says, voice warm and indulgent. “Lovely to see you.”

“You as well, Matilda,” Elsa answers, eyes straying to Hans.

“I’m happy to see you’ve found your man.”

Elsa blushes, and Hans clears his throat.

“He’s not my man.”

“We’re friends.”

Hans and Elsa speak at the same time. Elsa blushes deeper, and Hans scowls.

“We were going to catch up over breakfast. Isn’t that right, Hendrick?” Elsa says, nearly nudging him with her tone.

Hans looks between them. “Er, I—”

“Laan is still whippin’ up some batches of food if you both fancy that,” Matilda says. “Hendrick can vouch for the quality.”

“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” Elsa directs to Hans. She’s smiling as if she knows he can’t refuse. Between their two expectant faces, he doesn’t think he can.

He exhales a sigh. “Sure.”

They take a seat at a table in the tavern’s front dining room. Matilda promises them their most renowned brunch specialty, which is a miso glazed duck hash with fried eggs and peppers and, Hans admits, the most creative thing on their entire menu. Elsa asks for a cup of strongly brewed tea. Hans asks for a cold glass of water, which he may splash into his face instead of drink.

“What happened to your shoes?” he asks.

“Boots take too long to lace up when you’re chasing someone,” she shrugs, blowing daintily on her tea.

If boots took too long, then… “You got a dress on under that cloak?”

Her eyes pierce him over the rim of her tea cup. “You’ll find out later.”

Her tone is sharp with unwavering certainty. She doesn’t blush. She doesn’t hesitate. Whatever happened to her in the year interim has eroded her fear. She smiles at him, and Hans swallows. He begins to feel more and more unsure by the second.

His heart thuds hollowly. It is depleted with nothing left. He must remember that. He can’t remember that terrible grip she had on him the previous night. She’s disrupted his life, and pleasure of the flesh is not an ointment for emotional fractures. There is nothing unique about their situation. Nothing at all.

“That an invitation?” he asks, remaining cavalier.

“Mm,” she sips. “A promise.”

“I guess I’m paying for the meal, aren’t I?”

“I did compensate you so _well_ last night.”

His mind flashes to the trembling of her thighs against his hips. But she’s probably talking about the bill from the bar.

“Fine, queen, have it your way.”

Matilda brings them their meals, saying, “Eat up, love birds. This is on the house.”  
  
Hans clears his throat. “Matilda, that’s unnecessary—“  
  
“Now, now. It’s the least I can do.” She winks. “Enjoy.”  
  
She saunters away, and Hans wonders if she has a secret peephole behind the bar to spy on them.  
  
“You don’t have to be suspicious about every nice thing a person does for you, Hans,” Elsa says, unfolding her napkin. She stabs a small bite with her fork and tucks into the food.  
  
“I’d be a fool if I didn’t,” he says back, observing the shine of oil coating the hash. It looks delicious and decadent. The warning signals in his head are drowned out by the growl of his hunger. “No one does anything nice for free.”  
  
He hesitates before taking a bite, and his senses are filled with the richness of the duck. His hunger is suddenly ravaging, and he demolishes his plate with a few strategic mouthfuls.  
  
“That’s not always true,” she says. She’s every bit the slow, demure eater. The oil coats her lips like gloss.  
  
“Okay. If you’re here for innocent, selfless reasons, then you’ll say you’ve made this visit out of the kindness of your heart. You expect nothing in return from this. Well—“ he amends. “I guess not nothing, if you count what happened last night.”  
  
She avoids his gaze, and he tries to see if she blushes. Astoundingly, she doesn’t. She frowns instead.  
  
“That was...mutually beneficial,” she relents. “But it was not the reason why I came here.”  
  
“Sure. You could get any of your forest men to do whatever you pleased. You didn’t come here to fuck me. So why did you?”  
  
She places her fork aside and takes a sip of her tea. She gives him a generous stare.  
  
“I wanted to see how you were faring."

Hans crosses his arms and sits back in his seat.

“What did you want in return?”

She holds his stare for a minute longer before she glances away. She picks up the neck of her fork, hovers above the rest of her meal, and places the fork down again.

_I’m right_ , he thinks. She wants something. _What more could she possibly want?_

“I was…” she pauses. “I was going to see if you would come with me.”

His eyebrows furrow. “With you where?”

“The forest. My…my forest. If you hadn’t found a home…if you hadn’t made a place for yourself.”

He looks around the tavern at the other patrons eating their food, drinking their coffee and teas, reading news bulletins and books. No one is giving the two of them a second glance.

“Why would you do something so…” he pauses. “Absurd?”

Her mouth pinches, and her shoulders buckle back. She’s pushing her thumb into the silver metal of the fork. “Perhaps it is absurd, but…” She finally looks up to him. “I wanted to give you the option.”

“I don’t understand you, queen,” he says, his tone stilted and acidic. “I don’t get it. You use me, you throw me out, you exonerate me, you invite me to your new kingdom?” He laughs. “I knew you’d miss my dick, but I didn’t realize you’d be pining for it after a year.”

She’s getting angry. He can feel the spiked tang of it in the air between them. Her ice spills out of her fingertips and frosts the tongs on the silverware. She looks sharply away from him, toward the open spaces of the room.

“Did you not hear me last night?” she whispers.

His twisted smirk sours into a frown.

_Hans, I love you._

His mind darts over all of the memories that have haunted him. All her words and denials.

“You’re mistaking physical pleasure for something that it’s not,” he drawls. “You told me that, once, and I fear this is the same, _my darling.”_

She flinches a little. An icicle forms along the table, but she melts it quickly.

“What do you want me to do?” she asks, and Hans thinks this might be a struggle for her. Her eyes are crinkling at the corners. “How do I prove to you that I’m not lying?”

This is terrifyingly difficult. He wants to believe her. His stomach folds over with longing. More than anything he wants this to be real, but it’s too generous to be authentic. He’s taught her well in the art form of manipulation, and he doesn’t trust himself to play the game with her again. Not when he couldn’t win. Not when he was pushed into her spell.

“Take everything I have,” he says. “Take it and replace it with all of your magic. Fill me up with your ice.” He leans forward. “That’s what I want.”

“How can I do that, Hans?”

He shrugs. “Figure it out.”

They stare at each other for a terrible, long, aching moment. Finally, Elsa stands and steps forward, grasping one of his hands. There is resolve in her face. It is thunderous and determined, and Hans wonders for a brief moment when she became so fierce.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll give you what you want.”

She pulls him up from the table, leaving her half-eaten meal and their unfinished drinks. She herds him to the stairs and up to the hallway that holds her bedroom. She locks the door behind them, and she pushes him toward the wrinkled, unused mattress. He sits on the edge, and she straddles his lap with her thighs.

He watches her, his heart betraying him with its spiking, undulating rhythm. Her hair and ice coalesce around them.

“This is all I know,” she murmurs, bringing her lips to his neck. She must taste the heat of his blood, being so close. His hands find her lower back, covered with her thick cloak. It leaves too much to be desired. She reaches a hand between them, undoing his trousers and pushing her palm up against him. He exhales a puff of breath, and she nudges him down to lay back on the bed. She locks his arms against the bed with ice cuffs, and he’s not sure whether he should be mad, frustrated, or in a state of shock. He thinks he’s all three as he watches her tug down his trousers, her mouth leaving his neck and reaching his hip, then the joint of his thigh, then to the aroused skin. It’s pulsating, almost screaming against the gentle caress of her lips. His lungs squeeze, and his saliva is too thick to swallow.

“Elsa—you—”

She ignores him, slowly taking him into her mouth. His words halt, stuck and forgotten in the corridor of his throat. Her tongue is soft and sweet and experimental, and it’s all he can do to not let himself give in. He closes his eyes, because he can’t watch her do this. It’s too much already, with her platinum hair blanketing his thighs. Her hands crawling up his abdomen. Her ice does nothing to stop the sweat pooling along the divots of his collarbone.

His breaths come out in a wheeze. She’s pulling and licking, and something guttural scrapes though his chest. 

“I—I…”

“Don’t say anything,” she tells him. “Just let me love you.”

_Let her love me,_ he thinks, his mind hazy in a euphoric fog. It’s never been such an easy thing. She’s breaking him down so effortlessly, and it must be how indulgent she is, how unrelenting, how unassuming and gentle. The strokes are continuous and merciless, and he’s never had this before. He’s never felt a woman’s mouth use him without words or tell him a story without a breath.

He won’t last much longer. He clenches his stomach in a futile attempt to quell it. She must know. She moves a hand to grip him while she kisses him, flicks of ice urging against him. Her other hand presses against his stomach.

“Elsa,” he tries. She’s the only thing he can think of coherently through the fog. She’s the only thing he can see. “Elsa.”

A few more strokes and a few more curls of her tongue, and—that’s it.

She takes it all.  
  


* * *

  
She releases him from her ice, but he’s too weak and spent to care about moving his arms. She crawls over him so they are face to face. Her eyes are vibrant and sharp, and he has no other words. She has taken those, too, because she is still greedy and wanting.

She leans forward and kisses him. Her lips are salty and sweet, contrasting immaculately like dark caramel. It is slow and thick, a viscous pour from her into him. Her hands come up to hold his face, her nails blending into his hair. Her body presses fully against him, as cloaked and covered as they are. Hans is dewy with leftover sweat and heat, and his hands come up to wrap around her and keep her there.

When they break away, they gaze at one another. Elsa runs her fingers through the bangs on his forehead. He runs his hands underneath her cloak, up and down her back. She’s only wearing her underwear, and his fingers tease the band on her hips.

There is something pure about this. Pure and fleeting. Hans tries to hold tight over what she looks like in the hues of yellow and white light filtering through the window.

Eventually, Elsa softly says, “I’ve had three deaths in my lifetime.”

_She’s too young to have had three,_ he thinks. _I’ve only had one._

“One was when my parents died, and I was alone with my powers. I was terrified of hurting my sister. I was terrified of doing the wrong thing and repeating my mistakes from years prior. They took part of me with them when they left.”

One of her fingers runs underneath the skin of his eye, and he brings one hand out from under her cloak to touch her hair.

“A second time was when you almost killed Anna. When I thought you truly killed her. For those few minutes of my life, I felt what it would have been like without her. Without anyone. I felt anger, rage, and a sadness that ran so deep it could never be pulled out of me. Any of the goodness left within me had disappeared.”

He wants to say _I’m sorry,_ but she’s smiling down on him and his words are still taken—gone somewhere out of his reach.

“The last time,” she continues. “The last time was when I was swallowed up by my power, frozen in what is now my sanctuary in the Northern Sea. After you were gone, I was called there. The forest was locked by magic, and I learned of my past and my mother and my powers and my family’s past and—” She pauses. “The magic consumed me, and I died for a while. I have no specific recollection or memory, but I remember the deep freeze and the darkness.”

_The deep freeze. The darkness,_ Hans thinks. _It’s like going to sleep._

“Each one was different. Each one took something from me, but they gave me something, too.”

She shakes her head, and Hans knows immediately—her fierceness, her determination. Gone is the meek queen. She has been gone for a long time. She is resilient from her tribulations. She is a dragon, imbued with magic and mighty with her wings spread.

And yet, here she is, curled up on his chest like he’s enough.

“I knew I couldn’t survive another,” she says. “After a few months of living in the forest, I knew I had to find you.”

His words are unlocked from her own. “You did?”

“I missed you,” she says.

He swallows. “We hardly know each other.”

“I know you well.”

“We know our bodies.”

She’s undeterred. “I know your mind, Hans. And what I don’t know, I’ll get to know. If you come with me.”

She kisses him again, and he has no option but to kiss her back and drink her sweetness.

“You told me, once, that everything would be different if we cared,” Elsa mumbles against his lips. “If it mattered. I care. It matters to me, now. I think everything is different.”

His heart bows under the pressure of her words. He expels a breath.

“Elsa—”

“You don’t have to say anything,” she says. “You don’t have to agree.”

The daylight changes the tone of the air and how they look at each other. When once, their stares were hard and unforgiving, there is now a tenderness and a fathomless vulnerability. The moon made them ghostly specters, hiding in a state of black and white. The sun colors them like a faded, weathered photograph, sepia-toned with speckles of pastel brightness.

It is terrifying with her laying on him, looking at him like they could be.

He kisses her, urging his tongue deeply into her mouth. He curls his arms around her like bands, and she sighs into him, relaxed and boneless.

It is terrifying how much he wants this. How much he _wants._ Everything he’s wanted has been a fruitless endeavor, slipping out of his grasp. If she slips between his fingers, he doesn’t think he’ll survive it.

His body recovered, he turns them over. He continues to kiss her, edging up her cloak. She lifts her arms as he reveals her pale skin, smooth and milky. It is unblemished and deceptive, hiding all of the scarring and bruising. She unbuttons his shirt, running her hands underneath to drop it behind them. He kisses her jaw, her neck, tasting the ridge of her collarbone, suckling her breasts. His fingers roam to her underwear, trespassing beneath the lacy details. She is slick and intoxicating, and she rolls her head back with utter abandon. Her body twists under his ministrations, and she pules. Her hands grasp all around him, indecisive and wild, her body rocking with sensations that are too powerful and too much. Her ice spills along the walls and the floor like splattered paint, coloring their world fluorescent and blinding.

“Hans, oh,” she whimpers, gasping. “Please. Please go with me.”

He rolls her wet underwear down her legs and flicks them to the ground. He kisses her, and icicles line his mouth. He positions himself before, and he pushes into her slowly. A low groan passes his lips. “I want to,” he admits. “God, I want to.”

“What’s stopping you?” Her legs fall wider, and she’s so _agonizingly_ tight. He tries to steady his pace, rolling with deliberate and measured thrusts.

“I died, too, but only once,” he says. It is hard to speak. The pressure is building in his abdomen, truncated, muted—kindling that will go up in flames and swallow him. “I can’t do it again, either. I—I can’t—”

“You won’t,” she says. Her breath shudders. “Oh, you won’t.”

“I’m afraid.”

“So am I.”

“Shit,” he moans. “I think I need this forever.”

They breathe each other in. When once, they were always too close, they now fight to get closer, past the barricade of skin. She kisses him hard, fingertips clawing him more and more desperately with each thrust he gives her. They are winding up, winding up, the pressure intensifying, the kindling raging with embers. Her body thrums with the electrical buzz, invading him like hooks.

“I meant what I said, Hans,” she tells him, her voice ringing and higher pitched. His bones are beginning to quake. “I love you.”

This time he is wide awake. He believes her.

When they lie beside one another, it is nostalgic. A year ago, he wanted her to physically end his life and steal his spirit. She’s continuing to steal his spirit, but now his life feels like it is expanding and lengthening, interwoven with her own like threads woven into cloth.

“I’ll go,” he answers her.

The smile she gives him is blistering and radiant. The sepia and pastels are transformed into vivid blues and rose petal pinks and velvet indigos.

They leave the next day. Hans doesn’t give notice to anyone except Matilda. He leaves her a note on the check-out counter to tell her he has found better employment under the directives of a queen.

They ride on Elsa’s water horse, and Hans is encompassed by her magic. He feels the heartbeat of winds, sees the winking of flames and the footsteps of rock and earth. As she shows him her forest, enchanted and brimming with electrical hums, the sensations coat his mouth and spark through him like a fuse.

She shows him her favorite spot—an unassuming meadow hidden from the prying eyes of her tribe. It is flecked with golden sunlight, hazy greens, and subdued hints of floral scents that season the air, and Hans thinks of the cigars he became so fond of. This meadow is far more indulgent and addicting, and he wonders how he ever could have thought he knew what magic tasted like. What it felt like.

He glances up, the branches of trees hanging over them like an umbrella, sheltering them from the ordinary. Elsa rests her head on his chest, dozing under the lazy afternoon light.

What it _feels_ like, he amends.

Quietly, so as not to disturb the world, he says, “I love you.”

Elsa smiles against him. Her magic burns into his skin like combusting fire, seeping down to the core of his heart.

It is like the first breath upon waking and the last breath before sleep.


End file.
